


Thicker than Blood

by Starcross



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Action galore, At this point it's crocheting really, Bounty Hunter Boyfriends, F/M, Family Fluff, Gen, Kids being smart, M/M, Oh Happy Gay, So Many Dad Jokes, Tying Loose Ends
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-20
Updated: 2018-02-17
Packaged: 2018-08-09 22:32:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 49,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7819825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starcross/pseuds/Starcross
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jango Fett has faced death and politely declined the opportunity more often than he can count, but this time has been the closest ever.</p><p>Fortunately, Boba would rather be eaten by a rabid Wampa than watch his father die, and he will do whatever it takes to save him.<br/>Even passing them both for clones to infiltrate the newly formed Grand Army of the Republic.</p><p>It is unfair, really. Jango had planned to have a nice day, kill some Jedi and maybe take a bubble bath.<br/>Not  struggle  to  survive  among  stupidly  patriotic  versions  of  himself (that he'd better adopt before they get themselves killed),  all  while  trying  to  get  his  son back and investigating on some disturbing revelations in the process...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Unfairness of Lightsabers

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It’s been fifteen years and I am not over THIS scene. And hey, now I fixed it. 
> 
> Have some Mandalorian loving, friends.

The battle was raging in the Petranaki arena, and Jango was starting to think that the day might not end exactly how he had planned.

It was supposed to be an easy job. And therein, he reflected as he shot another Jedi, was probably the core of the problem. His latest accomplishments had clearly made him overconfident, and if he hadn’t been busy wrestling with one of these bloody Padawans, he would almost have slapped himself.

You didn’t last long in the bounty hunting world if you started resting on your laurels. There were complacent bounty hunters - the profession tended to attract people with planet-sized egos and an addiction to challenges, after all – and there were old bounty hunters, but old complacent bounty hunters weren’t a thing. And Jango firmly intended to become a grumpy old man at some point, and to spend his retirement days sitting on a ridiculously high pile of credits, uncomfortable as it may sound.

He would have to be more careful, and to stop taking victories for granted. This was a valuable and interesting lesson from life, albeit a little embarrassing.

Almost as interesting and embarrassing was the fact that reek skin apparently deflected blaster shots.

He let out a string of curses when the beast trampled him. He should have known this. He should have looked into what kind of creatures the karking king of Geonosis was planning to use for that preposterous execution, in case things went wrong. Things always seemed to go wrong lately, he reflected in a rare moment of self-pity. That was what you got from dealing with Force users. Sith or Jedi or whatever other ludicrous cult they followed, problems trailed them like infatuated Joggan flies. Maybe they exuded some sort of pheromones of destiny? If that was the case, they could at least be kind enough to stop dragging him in their wake.

The bounty hunter counted three broken ribs as he painfully stood up, and he shot the bloody beast with one of his wrist missiles. A surge of guilt went over him as the reek stumbled dead at his feet. Boba liked animals, and he had watched the Jedi ride this one with starry-eyed envy. He would have to make up for this.

Truth be told, a nice fauna-watching vacation on Ylesia sounded rather appealing at the moment.

Jango took a decision. He would get rid of the Jedi swarming him like startled fireflies, try to avoid being shot by his own clones – bunch of ungrateful jerks that they were – then grab his son under one arm and say to heck with it.  He needed a break, and he was getting tired of Dooku’s labyrinthine plots anyway. To be perfectly honest, he was starting to wonder if the Separatist leader actually managed to keep track of all his conspiracies, or if he was just so addicted to intrigues that he jumped in on any one that crossed his path. Which would explain a lot, actually.

Yes, a few weeks on a lush planet far from any politics-obsessed aristocrats or whiny businessmen would be a real delight. Wild creatures were maybe dangerous and deadly, but at least they had the common courtesy of looking like it.

It was at this moment that Mace Windu charged him like a glowstick-waving storm of fury and righteousness.

The bounty hunter snapped out of his holiday planning, swore when the purple saber cut through his beloved blaster, and dodged an attack that would have decapitated him. He couldn’t avoid the next move, though, and a pain sharper than anything he had ever endured exploded through his torso.

The scream of agony that came to his lips was almost instantly echoed by his son.

His legs went weak under him, and he fell backwards as the world started spinning around. The wound in his belly sent throbbing tendrils of pain through his entire body, and the scorching burn almost made him throw up. He stared in disbelief at the hole through his armor – through his whole fucking entire body, the observant part of him corrected. His fingers mechanically came probing the injury, and he nearly passed out at the view of his gloved phalange disappearing into the wound.

_He impaled me. The karking fucker literally impaled me. How are lightsabers even legal?_

Realization hit him when he felt hands grabbing his shoulders, dragging him to cover.

_I am going to die._

Panic overwhelmed his brain, and he started wheezing as trembling hands took off his helmet. It took him a couple of seconds to recognize his son. Boba’s face was a mask of terror and dismay, and tears were streaming across his cheeks as he stuttered.

“Dad? Dad, can you hear me?”

Jango’s gaze locked with his son’s, and a new dread engulfed him, deeper and colder than anything he had felt in a long time.

_I am abandoning you._

“Dad, listen to me!” Boba’s voice was shrieky and punctured with distressed sobs.

The bounty hunter clenched his teeth as a wave of pain flooded through his body. It couldn’t be happening. Not now. Not like this. Not while his son was kneeling beside him, with his small fingers clutching his armored shoulders as if he was trying to pry him away from the cold grip of death.

“It’s not that bad”, the kid sniffled. “I promise, it’s n-not. It’s l-low on your belly and it… cauterized… it’s just the pain, just the pain, you have to hold on, please…”

 _He is so young_ , Jango realized. He had spent the last years forming the kid to his business, teaching him his ways and slowly giving him responsibilities, but Boba was still a child. And now he was going to leave him on his own. Guilt was drowning all the fear he felt now, and tears came to his eyes as well.

“I am sorry”, he whispered.

“No! Don’t you dare, you…”

The sting to his face brought him back to reality for a second, and it took him a moment to realize his son had just slapped him across the face. Incredulity was quickly replaced by an absurd surge of fatherly vexation. _No dessert for you tonight, young man._

“You can’t leave me! “ the kid blurted out as he bumped his fist on his chestplate. “You can’t! I have nobody else! Now just listen to me!”

The anger in Boba’s voice was so powerful that Jango found himself forgetting about the pain for a moment.

“You’ll be fine”, the child piped. “It’s not that bad, you just need… you have to go through it, I’ll find painkillers, and-and…”

“Bacta”, Jango said in a faint mutter.

The burn on his cheek stung like hell, but it had apparently succeeded to turn back on the rational part of his brain. The kid was right, so right it hurt. He couldn’t leave him. And if his heart didn’t stop from the shock, panic and pain flowing through his veins, he could survive this, provided the tissues were repaired soon enough.

 _I have no choice anyway_ , he thought absent-mindedly.  _We still have to go to Ylesia so you can pet a reek. I’ll just die another day._

He felt his son’s hands fumble through his belt packs, his shaking fingers getting more and more erratic.

“I-I… can’t find it!” the kid stuttered.”Did you… did you drop it somewhere?”

The bounty hunter bit his tongue to repress a distressed whimper.

_Please don’t tell me I’m about to die because of an improperly closed supply pouch. This is even worse than the Case Of The Jumpy Nemoidian, which shouldn’t be possible._

“It’s alright”, Boba whispered. “Alright, alright, alright. I’ll… I’ll find something. Stay here, and don’t let go. Please, dad.”

His vision started to blur as the child stepped away, and it took all of his mental strength to refrain from fainting. He was busy breathing in patterns while visualizing geometrical figures when he felt his son kneel back at his side.

“You’re not gonna like this”, his voice said, ”but it will work. It will. You just need to promise you’ll stay with me. Dad?”

Jango nodded stiffly, teeth gritted so hard that his jaw was starting to hurt.

Something blazed around his wound, and this time he didn’t even have time to scream before his mind went blank.

The last words he heard were a strident “Promise me!”, and everything swirled into darkness.

\----

During one of his numerous perilous missions on remote worlds, Jango had almost been smothered by a vaporous fluffy creature, which had plunged from to a tree to wrap itself around his face like a cuddly yet murderous piece of cotton candy.

His head felt quite the same at the moment, although he could breathe. Which was always a good thing. Breathing was underrated, he reflected.

His eyelids were so heavy that he feared they had been glued for a second – which reminded him of yet another amusing encounter with wild fauna – but with tremendous effort, he managed to open his eyes.

“CC-6217 is awake”, a soothing droid voice said somewhere.

Jango blinked a couple of times to get accustomed to the bright light, and he found himself staring at his own face.

It was a nice face, mind you, but a disconcerting vision nonetheless.

“Welcome back, brother.”

The bounty hunter felt puzzled as he tried to analyze his environment, which was made difficult by the cottony goo inside his head. It looked like the Malastare Plushy Death had finally found a way inside his cranium.

A lifetime of reflexes came to his rescue, and he scrolled through the list obligingly provided by his senses.

He was naked – well, he technically had underwear on, but his armor was gone, which was all that mattered – on a rather comfortable mattress, under a thin linen sheet. Beeping sounds and soft talking filled the background, and in front of him sat a man clad in a white apron over military clothes, who very definitely had his face on. Sudden wariness came over Jango – shapeshifters were always bad news, and he clearly wasn’t in a state to defend himself.

Fortunately, his brain suggested to finish the round of observation before starting to panic, and he obediently complied. Epiphany came in the form of a Republic flag hanging on the wall, and his mouth went dry at the sight of dozens of beds like his lined across the room. Indistinct silhouettes were lying in each of them, some with medical droids hovering around.

Clones. Of course. For a moment, he had almost forgotten.

It occurred to him that the man staring at him might expect an answer, and he hesitantly spoke, his voice crackled by dehydration.

“Hi. Where… where are we?”

“Medical station X-89-C”, the clone said with a smile. “I gotta say, you’re a resilient one. Your chances of survival were pretty low.”

Jango carefully returned his smile as his brain finally started to reboot. He remembered now. The pain bursting through his belly, Boba’s face, the searing burn which had made him pass out. He pushed the sheet away; a very large bacta bandage was stuck to his abdomen, and he flinched when he lifted a corner to glance beneath it.

Below the slimy green goo clinging to his skin were blisters and burnt tissues all across his flank, which disconcerted him. The lightsaber wound had been painful as hell, but it had been clean and precise; this was something else.

“No touching yourself, buddy”, the clone warned him with an amused grin, “or you’re gonna get the ‘cuffs.”

“What happened?”

“You tell me. Were you stabbed by that droid monster thing?”

Jango had no idea what the clone was referring to, and making up stories had never been his forte.

“I can’t remember”, he simply said. “Something impaled me.”

“Some kind of vibroblade, I think. Well, you were lucky.”

 _Lucky I had Boba to hold onto_ , Jango thought. A flash of lucidity came over him as his last memories stirred. The pain on his abdomen. The look on his son’s face. It all clicked together now. The clones would never have taken him in with a lightsaber injury, not without asking questions; the kid had managed to camouflage it before somehow passing him for one of their own.

He took a few seconds to silently bless his child with all his heart. Boba hated seeing him injured, he knew, and he always winced when he had to help him with stitches; burning him like that must have been excruciating for the soft-hearted kid.

They would spend a full month on vacation, Jango decided, and he was going to scandalously spoil his son. Hell, if he had to trap and stun every single animal on the planet so that the kid could cuddle them, he goddamn would.

This raised another topic in his mind, and a sting of anxiety hit his throat. Boba had to be somewhere here as well. He wouldn’t have left him, and now he was on his own, surrounded by clones…

“How did I get here anyway?” he asked with fake surprise. “I think I passed out on the battlefield…”

He realized halfway through that there was a question he should have asked earlier - the first question a real clone would have asked.

“Did we win?” he added with an ardor he hoped to be credible.

“We did”, the clone reassured him. “But we lost a lot of good brothers out there…”

“My squad?” he urged.

The anxiety was real, although it had nothing to do with the survival of a bunch of random troopers. He was injured, and naked, and alone among enemies of a sort - even though he personally couldn’t care less about galactic politics, the clones’ behavior on the battlefield left no doubt as to how they felt about their generous DNA provider.

If a bunch of clones came up and realized that their “brother” was incapable of recognizing them, his cover wouldn’t last for long.

The clone shook his head sadly, and Jango felt so relieved that a pinch of guilt embedded itself in his heart. He didn’t care much for the lives of other people, but all the dead deserved respect.

“I’m sorry.”

“Me too. They were good soldiers.” The bounty hunter sighed before faking a frown. “Wait, who brought me here then?”

A wide smile came back to the clone’s face.

“Oh, right! I can’t believe I forgot to tell you. A cadet carried you here!”

“A cadet?”

“Yeah”, the man chuckled. “No higher than my waist. Apparently, he sneaked on one of the dropships so he could help fighting. Can you believe it?”

 _Yes_ , Jango thought with a burst of pride. Boba had actually done this before, on the first mission they had worked together. He had left him on Kamino as usual, not wanting to endanger him, but the child was having none of it. He had hidden in the vents of Slave I, got stuck, and the bounty hunter had spent thirty minutes extirpating his very contrite offspring from the durasteel tubes.

He had never left him behind again, after that.

“That’s incredible!” he said to the giggling clone. “Where is he now?”

“Oh, we sent him back to Kamino right after he got to the medbay”, the man answered waving a hand. “You can’t have younglings running around on a battlefield, that just doesn’t look very professional. Although it was quite a sight, I gotta say.”

_You did what?_

Jango felt his heart skip a beat, and even his thirty years of experience hiding emotions and keeping his composure were barely enough to stop him from jumping on the clone. They had his son. They had taken him away. The fact that “away” was the planet where they had spent the last ten years didn’t help one bit. If anyone there recognized him, now that the war had started, now that people identified him as an ally of the Separatists…

An ice-cold shiver ran up his spine.

“He’s gonna be fine, isn’t he?” he asked in his most casual voice.

The clone snickered.

“He’s gonna get one hell of a lecture, most likely. Granted, the intention was good, but it was completely irresponsible. He’s not ready yet.”

 _Well, screw you_ , Jango thought angrily. _And for your information, you were born the same year._

Deep down, he had to admit that it wasn’t the same, that Boba was as normal a kid as a Fett could be, whereas the clones were... different. He didn’t know exactly what to think of them, honestly. Could you say that ten years of military formation and growth hormones made them adults? Or just too-fast-grown cannon fodder?

The clone’s remark had ruffled his feathers, anyway. His decision to take Boba with him on jobs had often earned him thinly-veiled criticism, from employers and colleagues alike. “Isn’t he a bit young for such a life?” “Doesn’t he slow you down?” “Shouldn’t your karking whelp be at school ruinin’ someone else’s day?“ (That was the one and only time Cad Bane had ever spoken of his son like this. And strangely enough, no other hunter had ever voiced anything but careful praising about Boba after that.)

And of course, the worst question of all.

_“Aren’t you afraid something will happen to him?”_

_“No”,_ he always answered _.” I’m the one who happens to people”._ And it was the truest lie he had ever told.

He wasn’t afraid. He was terrified. So deeply, so strongly that it had become a part of him. He knew that people would always try to use his child against him, and one of the reasons he took Boba with him was because the idea of coming home to a rampaged house and a ransom note gave him nightmares.

But it wasn’t what scared him most. Being the best had its perks, of course. But it also meant that you had to be the best, whatever it took.

Boba had been taken hostage, once. A Trandoshan clan leader had found out that he was after the same bounty as her, and she had kidnapped the child as leverage. He remembered the sight of her reptilian claws around his son’s throat, the hiss of her voice as she told him all the things she intended to do, but mostly he remembered Boba’s look.

The absolute trust in the brown eyes they shared, the confident half-smile stretching his juvenile cheeks. He had never even doubted that his father would win. Because he was Jango Fett, and Jango Fett was invincible.

Except he really wasn’t, as today had once again reminded him.

Faith could give wings, but they were a heavy burden too.

Faith meant he couldn’t ever fail.

And he wouldn’t.

“What was his name?” he asked the clone in a detached voice. “I would like to thank him.”

“Said he was called Lucky. Quite fitting, really. We’re heading to Kamino so you and the others can recover safely, you can try to find him – although I really don’t think you should encourage him.”

“He was brave”, Jango protested despite himself.

“That he was”, the man agreed, “and I expect he got a bunch of high-fives on his way out. But cadets should be busy learning to follow orders, not hopping on spaceships in search of adventure.”

_Follow orders. Of course._

Jango’s face remained as blank and composed as ever, but disdain filled his mouth with a nasty taste.

“I’ll make sure to explain him that he should stick to theory for now”, he said plainly. “Still, I owe him my life.”

“Eh”, the man shrugged. “He did what anyone would have done. We’re brothers, after all. We have each other’s backs.”

The bounty hunter gave his duplicate a friendly smile, but his heart felt cold as stone.

 _You are no brother of mine_ , he thought. _You are nothing. Only a brainwashed overgrown_ _child soldier who happens to wear my face. Genetics are the only thing we share. None of you mean anything to me._

_Except the tiny hotheaded nugget I have the fortune of calling my son._

He had never hidden the truth from Boba. As soon as he had been old enough to understand, Jango had explained him what cloning was, in clear and simple words. The child had pondered for a bit, then his eyes has glistened with hope, and he had asked if it meant that he would be as strong as him someday.

“Much stronger”, his father had replied while ruffling his hair.

Boba had chuckled, and asked him if they could go feed the fishies now. They had thrown pieces of stale bread into the water until a gigantic tentacle came probing the platform to see who the generous benefactors were. Taun We had lectured them both all evening about the dangers of sea creatures, but it was worth it. There were still traces of the enormous suckers below the terrace.

For a second, he wondered if he ought to call the Kaminoan lady for help. She had always been kind to him and Boba, and he had almost come to think of her as a friend… but it was dangerous. It had been nice to have a place to return to during these last ten years, a safe haven far from the turmoil of his daily life, and he even felt a hint of nostalgia at the idea that these times were over. But a bounty hunter’s life meant always being on the edge, and never relying on other people if he could avoid it.

Besides, the Kaminoans were an unpredictable species. Despite Taun We’s apparent affection for the Fett family, she could very well decide to hand them both over to the Jedi because it was better for business. No, he couldn’t take that risk now that the war had started.

He would handle this as he always did: on his own.

“CC-8915 is awake”, the droid from earlier said.

The clone uncrossed his legs and got up, patting Jango on the arm as he walked by him.

“I’ll go see him now. The medics say it’s good for recovery to talk to someone when you revive.”

“Thanks a lot”, the bounty hunter said with a brave smile.

 “No problem, brother. Take your time. When you feel better, you can pop by the arsenal to get your armor back. It should be repaired by now, just give them your ID number.”

_Shit._

The droid had said it, hadn’t it…?

The memory suddenly bounced back into his brain as panic started to take over.

CC-6217 _._ That was him now. A nameless identity for a faceless man.

He closed his eyes for a moment, and focused on his breathing until he felt perfectly calm.

Everything was going to be alright. He just had to pass for a stupid clone until they reached Kamino, then find Boba, steal a ship, and fly off onto a lengthy holiday. After that, he would be back into business, except he intended to stay away from lightsaber users for the rest of his career. Dooku could find someone else for his dirty work.

A satisfied smile came playing about his lips.

It was going to be easy. He was sure of that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jango never learns, does he?  
> This is going to be a short fic (5-6 chapters) focusing mostly on Jango getting to know his clones, going through unexpected adventures and maybe changing his mind on a few things.  
> Stick around for Fett family feels, folks!


	2. The Versatility of Cocoa (part 1)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh boy, am I late. Sorry folks, I am terrible at time management and the last weeks have been pretty crazy – quitting my job, some stuff piling up, and of course getting distracted with the most amazing book of the year by the one and only Daniel O’Malley. Anyway, here’s chapter 2 (Silver & Dust will be next, it takes a bit longer to write compared to this one), hope you enjoy it!

Jango poked his head prudently through the doorway, and his face looked back two dozen times.

He held back a disheartened grunt and stepped into the Lounge, as people here called it. To be perfectly honest, it was merely an oval room at the back of the cruiser, with uncomfortable benches scattered around, the same clinical lighting as in the rest of the ship, and an ersatz of bar counter whose taps only served Kaminoan-approved, nutrient-dense, tragically alcohol-deprived drinks, which had made the bounty hunter whimper out loud when he found out.

 He usually seldom drank, and never while on jobs, and the medic had made it clear that the wound in his liver would require him to adapt his diet, but there was only so much a man could take and getting heavily hammered had been a prospect he was looking forward to.

Still, Jango had been wandering around the galaxy for a while, and he had frequented the rich and the mighty often enough to know that this was definitely not a lounge, let alone a Lounge. Count Dooku had one, and the Hutt Cartel too. And although admittedly, they smelled quite different from one another, the Oval Room of Despair was to them both what a homely ascetic minister might be to a burlesque troupe of bafflingly flexible acrobats.

The kind of whom, Jango reflected, had a surprisingly universal tendency to materialize in precisely those places; genders and species varied, but gaudy gymnasts covered only in glitter were just part of the DNA of any self-respecting lounge.

The Oval Room of Despair clearly had none, unless he had seriously misjudged his duplicates – which would make for an entertaining yet disturbing vision - ergo, it was not a lounge.

The clones loved it, though. So of course, CC-6217 did too. 

With a friendly smile plated across his face, the bounty hunter walked through the room to a slightly isolated seat, where he sat cross-legged with his protocol datapad. Although he had taken part to the very conception of the army, he needed a few reminders about appropriate clone behavior. In the last two days, he had managed to avoid most social interactions with the pretense of his injuries, but now he had been sent back to his comrades, and undercover work had always made him, well, nervous.

He would have laughed in the face of anyone who would suggest that out loud, right before breaking their nose (unless it was Bane, because Duros didn’t have noses, or Sugi, because she was very cute); yet, the truth remained. Pretending to be someone else unnerved him, and combined with the stress of finding Boba, the amount of pressure on his shoulders was getting close to his own personal fission point.

He sighed softly, wriggled on the bench a bit, and tried to focus on his reading. He spectacularly failed. The clones were cheerfully chatting and laughing around, and the multiplied sound of his own voice around him was just irking.

It was at this moment that his worst nightmare (not the absolute worst per se, but lately it had been in a consistent Top 10) proceeded to come true as someone slapped him in the back.

“Evening, mate!” the clone brightly said. “So, how’s that wound of yours?”

Screaming internally, Jango gave him his nicest smile.

_Fuck fuck fuckfuckfuck. Do I know him? Was he a friend of 6217? That’s not right. Usually they mostly bond among their squad, and my squad is dead. Did he mistake me for someone else?_

This last thought actually left him pondering for a few seconds. With thousands of similar faces, it had to happen sometimes. There were only so many haircuts and tattoos you could invent before getting duplicate duplicates. His head was starting to hurt, and he answered as naturally as he could – tone, as he had taught Boba, was always was mattered most in a conversation.

“Better. It still hurts like hell, but I’m standing. How about you?”

“Eh, it’s fine. I got a shiny new knee from the medics, so I’ll be back to kicking arses as soon as it stops squeaking. Seriously, listen. How annoying is that?”

The clone flexed his leg a couple of times, indeed producing a high-pitched creaking. Jango smiled despite himself.

“Not very discrete, is it?”

The clone chuckled.

“Can’t sneak out after curfew anymore, it seems. By the way, I’m Ash.”

The man extended his arm, and Jango squeezed his forearm with complete confusion. _Alright. So we don’t know each other, apparently? Then why the fuck did you come say hi and nearly give me a heart attack?_

“I’m Dawn”, he replied. Picking a new name had been among the first things he had done; the nicknames that the clones chose for themselves weren’t part of their official file, and he had counted on the fact that anyone who knew CC-6217 had presumably died on Geonosis. It was a risky bet, but if anyone remembered his old name, he could always pretend to have taken another as a soulful tribute after losing his brothers.

Answering to a new name with a natural automatism wasn’t as easy as it sounded, which was why he usually relied on a carefully picked variety of aliases, to which he had grown used over the years, but none of those fitted the clone naming pattern. “Dawn” did, and he was pretty confident he would assimilate it easily enough to avoid embarrassing moments.

Dawn reminded him of home.

Jango cleared his throat before adding apologetically:

 “Sorry, my memories are still a bit blurry – it is you I talked to when we were dropped off, right?”

“Nah, sorry buddy.” The clone shook his head. “We were just bed neighbors in the medbay, remember?”

“Of course!” Jango slapped his forehead with a burst of laughter. “My bad, I was a bit loaded.”

“No worry. Hey, do you want a drink? I’m trying to drown that shit prosthesis into silence.”

“Uh, sure. Thanks.”

Jango watched as his peppy counterpart limped to the bar, with a puzzling feeling in his heart. Friendliness had never come easily to him, not since he had become a hunter. He was always polite and courteous – at least until the point when he couldn’t reasonably be anymore - but bonding with strangers for no reason wasn’t in his nature. He was too distrusting for that, and things had never quite proven him wrong. The clones, however, were distressingly sociable.

It was normal, of course it was – they had been programmed to work together, to fight together, and to die together at some point; you didn’t build an army out of pathologically suspicious loners such as him. Some of them fought, argued, brooded, but deep down they all shared this unshakable trust in their brothers. _Good for them_ , Jango thought. He could understand that when the rest of the galaxy saw you as a bunch of disposable war machines, it must be good to have people who actually cared.

Truth be told, he had always felt slightly uneasy about the whole clone business, and even the outrageous amount of credits he had received hadn’t completely shut the questions in his mind.

He gave Ash a genuine smile as the clone returned with two large glasses of Not-Alcohol. There was, quite surprisingly, a bright blue glittery straw standing in the semisolid pulp that filled the cup. It looked like the Oval Room of Despair did possess some lounge-like qualities, after all.

(Or maybe there was a supply guy somewhere who had messed up the straw order, or just wanted to have a bit of fun. In any way, Jango mentally saluted their sense of aesthetics.)

“Guys! Shut up for a second!”

An orange-armored clone had just jumped to his feet, staring at his datapad.

“I can’t fucking believe this”, he muttered as the Lounge went suddenly quiet.  “I just got word from Captain Rex. The Original is dead.”

There was a few seconds of baffled silence, broken by a man with an intricate forehead tattoo.

“What, Fett? Jango Fett is dead?”

Jango Fett quietly sipped his drink through the fancy straw, and made a surprised face.

“You know another Original?”

“I thought the guy was unkillable”, another clone said.

 _Aww, that’s sweet,_ Jango thought fondly.

 _“_ Well, apparently not”, replied Orange Clone. “He was shot in the arena on Geonosis. The Jedi have just identified him.”

“How? DNA sampling?” another snickered.

“Not a lot of people go around wearing Mandalorian armor, apparently.” Orange shrugged.

_Guess that explains where it went. Shit. I liked that armor._

“That’s so… weird”, Ash said softly. “I mean, even if we didn’t know him, the guy was sorta… well, he was the Original, you know?”

“Yeah, I know”, Jango said. He patted his duplicate on the arm.

Another clone next to them snorted.

“Original, my ass. Good riddance, I say.”

“Yeah”, his neighbor approved. “At the end of the day, he was just a nasty bounty hunter who allied with the Separatists. Lending your genes doesn’t redeem a lifetime of lawlessness.”

“He helped with the training program too, I think”, Ash reflected.

“Another reason to hate him. Don’t tell me you never wished the worst death ever to the maniac who invented Mudchase Day.”

“Mudchase Day is great”, Orange intervened. “But I agree, the man was scum.”

Jango kept smiling pleasantly.

_Well, fuck you too. So much for my concerns about ethics, you can all go die in a fire._

“I don’t know”, Ash objected mildly. “We owe him a lot.”

_Except Ash. Heh, that’s funny. Ash, fire… Stars, I’m really tired._

“You’re right. A toast to the Original, may he have found peace!”

The bounty hunter raised his glass soulfully, along the other clones who were now chatting about the news.

 _Peace, my ass,_ he thought darkly as he made angry bubbles through the glittering straw.

He didn’t usually care much about what people thought of him – unless they were potential employers, in which case he strived to be thought of as reliable, charming, devastatingly competent and overall worth the outrageous amount of money he charged. The rest of the galaxy, as far as he was concerned, could consider him with any disdain they liked: if they didn’t have credits to spend on him, the feeling was mutual.

Still, it was a bit vexing to hear his clones talk as they did – his own clones, which he had made, with his own blood and bone marrow, although he had only undergone the marrow sampling on the first time. They had needed stem cells to begin the process, it had hurt like a bitch and taken him several weeks to recover, but the alternative proposed by Taun We was no option at all - the Kaminoans strongly believed in sterile surgical collection, but Jango believed even more strongly that extraction probes did not belong anywhere near his nether parts.

At least Ash seemed to be worthy of his precious cells.

He absent-mindedly exchanged with his new friend on the topic of his own death, warmly agreeing to his duplicate’s point of view, until a loud hooting came from a bunch of clones near the holovision deck.

“Wess, that’s for you!” one of them called.

“The Naboo Cute Piece herself!”

Jango stared in disbelief as the three clones pretended to faint at the sight of Senator Amidala’s holographic apparition. Another man – Wess, he assumed – was furiously blushing and glaring at his comrades.

A smile came to the hunter’s lips. Of course, it had to happen every now and then. Wess could have had worse taste in women, too. She was a bit young for his taste, and he had personally always preferred steel to silk, but the girl had something nonetheless. He had never understood Gunray’s obsession with having her killed –the man paid well, though, which at the end of the day, was what mattered most.

On the holodeck, the Naboo representative was apparently giving a very animated speech to the Senate.

“…not talking about droids, but about human beings! You are proposing to send off sentients to fight a war that shouldn’t be, a war that we have been trying to avoid for the last year, and that suddenly you are eager to fight now that it’s not your people on the line? This is unworthy of the Republic!”

“Wow, Wess, looks like your darling senator isn’t too fond of us.”

Wess looked sincerely saddened.

“An army, might I add, which appears out of nowhere at the most unlikely moment, and composed of people who have apparently been bred for war without anyone’s knowledge or permission…”

“Come on, lady”, one of the clones said while throwing his arms up. “How about you just do your job, and let us do ours?”

“Ugh”, Ash said. “Never liked senators, I gotta say. I know we’re meant to protect and obey them, but they are so far from real life...”

“For Force’s sake, Vicechair, these are people! Actual people! People who were forced to become soldiers while they are not even citizens of the Republic! How can you consider this?”

 _She’s got a point,_ Jango thought.

“She’s got a point”, his voice said.

_Oh, fucking hell. Did I think out loud again?_

He turned around and was relieved to discover a clone sitting on the floor, his chin resting on his knees.

Wess and his friends laughed loudly, and the man glared at them.

He didn’t bear any distinctive marking, apart from a rather nasty scar on his cheek, but there was something about him that drew Jango’s attention. The close position, unconsciously clutching his legs to protect himself. The defiance in his voice. The way he tried to carefully hide any emotion on his face. Somehow, he looked much more like him than any of the other clones.

_Could it be another one of this wretched lot is worth the semi-heart attack I got when Taun We came to my room with that horrifying needle-tube thing? “Stop being such a child, Jango, it’s only for fifteen minutes!” Actually, maybe that explains why I’ve never been into nurses. That’s some traumatic stuff._

_…I bet Bane would have been into it, though. I really need new friends._

“Aaaand Carrots is at it again”, sighed Wess as Jango snapped back from this very intrusive thought.

“I had missed that”, his friend said while rolling his eyes.

“What?” Carrots retorted dryly. “I’m just saying she’s technically right. Nobody gave us a choice, as I recall.”

“Yeah, we know, you’d rather be a jolly farmer…”

“…planting sage, beans and kolan potatoes…”

“…aaaaand carrots!”

“Fuck off”, Carrots muttered. “I don’t want to be a farmer, I’m just saying it would have been fair to give us the choice at some point.”

“The choice to be a bloody coward, you mean?” Wess joked.

The clone clenched his jaw, and brought his knees even closer to his chest, which Jango wouldn’t have thought possible. At this pace, the man was going to end up stuck with his kneecaps behind his sternum.

He couldn’t help agreeing with Carrots, although he didn’t dare to voice it. He needed to stay low, to avoid being noticed, and to reach Kamino without getting into any kind of trouble. But maybe he would say a few words of comfort to his rebellious copy, if he managed to talk to him alone.

“…and I beg you, Senators, to not let these prospects blind you. If we agree to send these men to their death on our behalf, we are starting a war we don’t deserve to win.”

A concert of booing accompanied Senator Amidala’s conclusion, and Orange slammed his hand against a bench.

“Quiet, you pricks!”

“Yeah, she’s still a senator. Dead wrong, but a senator.”

“And Wess’ true love.”

“I’m gonna find another, thanks.”

“I still think she’s right”, Carrots muttered. “Say what you want, she sees things better than you lot.”

“Careful, Carrots”, Wess chuckled. “Keep saying stuff like that, and you’re gonna get Rejected.”

The other clones laughed too, but a flash of pure terror ran across Carrots’ eyes, and Jango felt a strange tingle in the back of his neck.

He watched carefully as the unruly clone retrieved his composure.

Something was wrong.

He had no idea what Wess had been talking about, but he needed to know, and admitting his ignorance wasn’t an option. He resorted to his most classical approach in information retrieval.

“That’s not a real thing”, he exclaimed while shaking his head. “Don’t tell me you actually believe in that?”

“What, the Rejection? I don’t know, brother. I’ve heard stories…”

“Yeah”, Ash groaned, “we’ve all heard stories. A guy whose bedmate’s friend had a class partner who had a shooting pal who heard about a clone who mysteriously disappeared after saying Lama Su had a big butt. Stories.”

Wess giggled.

“Since when do Kaminoans have big butts? Or butts at all, really.”

“Stories can be true”, a clone added with a conspirator tone. “I’ve heard if you’re too much of a pain in the ass…”

“If pains in the ass were Rejected, Bright,” Ash said amiably, “you wouldn’t be here gracing us with your presence.”

“Very funny.”

The sound of a bell went off in every speaker of the room, and Jango flinched.

“Alright, children, time for bed”, Orange said. “We’ll reach Kamino tomorrow, provided we’re not stuck in another asteroid storm, so you better get ready for your medical checks.”

“Great”, Ash muttered. “Can’t wait to have droids fondle me while I run naked on a treadmill.”

“Is that customary protocol?” Jango enquired with slight concern.

“Only if you lose bits of your inferior body that include a buttock.”

“Talk about a pain in the ass”, the bounty hunter reflected as they made for the sleeping area.

Ash roared with laughter, and made him promise to meet up the next day for breakfast. Jango felt a smile blossom on his lips as he walked to his own bed, and the usual surge of guilt he tasted when he thought about the clones came over him.

He didn’t care about them, not as a whole. He couldn’t. He had seen enough families torn apart to know that blood wasn’t the thing that mattered, that DNA was as weak a link as could be, and that the people you called family were not always the ones who had brought you to the world. Love, care, trust; these were the foundations bonds were built upon, not the hazards of genetics.

It was a bit unsettling to see his own face in every corner, but it didn’t mean he was connected to any of them.

Except.

Except Ash’s smile and Carrots’ glare kept coming back to him, swirling under his close eyelids.

Ash had taken him under his wing without any hesitation, probably just because he had heard that CC-6217 had lost his entire squad and had nobody left. Things had been simple, simpler than Jango ever recalled them to be. Ash was kind and friendly, in that loud and rugged manner that he instantly trusted. There was something about him that made Jango feel terrible about the way the Republic people were talking about the clones.

Senator Amidala was right, curse her humanist soul and her pretty face. Ash was people.

Jango, as a rule, did his best not to care about people. But there were people, and then there were people who were nice and funny, and brought you a drink with a gaudy straw, and defended your actual self upon hearing of their decease, and were slated for certain death because of your own actions.

Ash hadn’t had a choice, and that changed everything. Jango easily shunned most of the folks he encountered on his missions; they had made their decisions, lived their lives, and they were the only ones to blame for whatever trouble they had gotten into. Free will meant responsibility.

But the clones had been coerced, plain and simple. They had been told “You will kill”, and so they killed. They had been told “You will die”, and so they died.

It was unfair, he admitted. And it felt like lancing an abscess of shame at the back of his mind.

The fact that he shared his DNA with the clones wasn’t the reason he was bound to them. He had taken part to the construction of the army. He had overviewed the training program. He was as responsible for the state of their existence as Dooku (which was yet another troubling mystery, but he had no time for that right now).

Most of them seemed fairly happy with their fate, as the reactions to Senator Amidala’s speech had shown, but he couldn’t forget the look in Carrots’ eyes.

The kid had been right. He should have included, at some point, an outing option inside the training program. With the number of clones who had walked through the Kaminoan halls, it was statistically normal to have some outliers who didn’t fit in the mold.

And for those, it was more than unfair. It was downright cruel.

 _Getting attached to clones was really not part of the plan_ , he internally grumbled.

The whole Rejection business also kept nagging at him. He was haunted by the look of horror on Carrots’ face when Wess had mentioned it.

Ash, despite his qualities, had been very wrong about this one thing. Stories, as Jango had learnt, seldom appeared out of the blue. There was always a basis to them.

The Rejection could have been nothing more than a bogeyman used to scare the clones into submission, but Carrots’ reaction had not been the anxious prudence of a superstitious man.

There had been knowledge in his terror.

Something was going on, and Jango didn’t like it.

He sighed, and buried his face in the hard pillow. One way or another, he would have to deal with this. Somewhere in between all the cover-maintaining, son-finding and accidental clone-befriending.

_I’m going to deserve that vacation trip like I never deserved anything before._

\---

Jango couldn’t have slept more than three hours when the sirens started howling. He woke up in utter confusion and panic, wondering who the fuck had thought a screaming alarm clock was a good idea, but the agitation in the dorm instantly reminded him of the clone signals.

Constant sirens meant an attack.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake”, he groaned. “Really? _Really?”_

Orange – whose actual name was Lieutenant Wolffe, he had heard – stormed in the sleeping area, shouting commands in his comlink.

“Up, everyone up! We’re under attack!”

“What the karking shit is going on?” asked Jango as he frantically put his armor on.

He hated being woken up by surprise. He had spent the last twenty years following a very strict sleeping schedule, from which he had rarely derived, with the notable exception of Boba’s first year; the joy of becoming a father had been a little spoiled by the exhaustion and constant stress caused by the adorable thing’s insufferable screaming.

Taun We had even asked him once, with a little pity in her starry eyes, if he wanted to reconsider his normal-growth-policy; he was very ashamed to admit that he had given some thought to it. The kid was loud, and so high-pitched that it could almost have been used to deactivate guard droids. (Almost. He had actually tried it out, on a day when he was very bored, but it had only gained him concerned looks from the guard droids in question.)

“We had to go out of hyperspace to cross the Balmorra Belt, and a Separatist cruiser thought it would be cool to say hi. They couldn’t pierce our shields, so now they are shipping battledroids right into the landing bay! Everyone to their blasters, and get ready to fight back!”

_Great. That’s just great. You know what, Count Dooku can definitely go fuck himself._

“But it’s a medical ship”, his neighbor protested. “What kind of assholes…?”

“Easy target”, the bounty hunter casually replied. “Better to get rid of a wounded enemy than to let them recuperate. And now that the war has started, they need to take quick actions. It’s logical. ”

“It’s uncool.”

Jango agreed heartily.

He shot a judgmental glance at his blaster as he holstered it. He hadn’t had the time to make all the modifications he wanted, and he felt very under-equipped in the plain soldier gear. Still, standing idly by wasn’t an option.

_Here’s hoping none of those clanking little shits has a lightsaber, because Boba won’t be here to save the day._

He followed as the clones streamed out of the dorm, and the world went insane.

The droids had apparently succeeded in breaching the defenses of the landing bay, because explosions and bursts of light were everywhere. Shouting and blaster sounds filled the corridors, and Jango felt the usual tingle in his palms as he gathered his wits for the fight to come.

He breathed in deeply, and time seemed to slow down around him, as it always did in battle. He tried to look around to assess the situation, but the helmet was hindering him – stupid thing didn’t even have a pineal sensor to see what was behind him, or a motion detector, or even electronic visualization. The whole equipment, he reflected, was far from optimal; the protection it provided was basic at most, and it was globally way too inadaptable to be helpful in battle.

_Who is the incompetent asshole who designed these armors, seriously?_

_… Oh, right. That would be me_.

He had purposely designed the armors for strict minimum efficiency, at the time - it had seemed like a good idea to make sure that the unlimited army wasn’t too invincible or too well-protected.  You never knew what might happen, after all.

Karma was a bitch, Jango reflected. He would have to meditate on that later, provided he would live to see a later.

He took off the useless helmet and plugged the radio piece inside his ear.

“The hell are you doing, man?” a clone cried out.

“I see better like this.”

He didn’t say it, but besides, it wasn’t like the helmet would do anything if he was shot in the head. Durasteel would resist medium-powered blasters, but the sounds he heard indicated heavy infantry. He didn’t feel like telling the clone, though. Most of them were very probably going to die; there was no reason to drain their morale on top of that.

_Alright. Let’s see…_

The droids had landed on the left flank of the ship, and through the transparent ceiling, he saw that a single ship had accosted them. He squinted, trying to recognize the model from what he could distinguish; it looked like a standard Geonosian battle cruiser, which meant around ten thousand droids waiting to be deployed, but basic security systems and fallible shields compared to a Republic starfighter.

There was positively no way for five hundred injured clones to take down an entire droid battalion, but it wasn’t the angle Jango was looking at. They weren’t far from Kamino, and he guessed that Wolffe’s first action would have been to call for help, so reinforcements were probably already on the way. It would take them two hours to reach the Balmorra Belt, and another one to cross it and get to their positions.

_Then it’s not a battle. It’s a three-hour siege._

Satisfied with his conclusions, the bounty hunter calmly settled his rifle against his biceps, kneeled behind a torn piece of wall, and started shooting.

His position was far from optimal – the fight was concentrated in the walkway that led from the landing bay to the rest of the ship, and clones ahead were somewhat blocking his field of vision – but Wolffe had commanded to stand their ground and push back the onslaught.

He personally would have rather retreated back to a more defendable position – maybe the Lounge – and just waited for the three hours to pass, with all exits sealed and unlimited drinks and perhaps a few decks of cards, but he doubted Wolffe would approve the proposal. Given the intensity of the attack, it was impossible to retreat without losing a huge number of men in the process, and the clones’ mentality did not agree well with dying fleeing.

Jango sighed, adjusted his aim, and kept on methodically taking down the smaller attackers – limiting the number of enemies you had to fight was always the top priority. It wasn’t any use defeating a difficult target if you got knocked out by a random droid in the process, as he had painfully learnt during a mission on Corellia. (Cad Bane kept bringing back the story of the Murderous Dildo-Wielding Android Maid every now and then, to Jango’s utter dismay and Sugi’s utter delight. He really, really needed better friends.)

His ear piece suddenly started crackling, and he winced at the sound. It looked like the Separatists were finally trying out that communication-jamming device Dooku had been so excited about.

 _Just give me ten minutes and a radio controller and it will blow in your face_ , Jango thought angrily.

He didn’t have ten minutes, though. Clones were now screaming along the hallway, and there seemed to be a crowd movement towards his position. He rose to his feet, trying to see what was going on, and he got a glimpse of an orange light before being grabbed by another clone and pulled to the opposite direction.

“… treat! Retreat! To th… ge…”

The bounty hunter pulled the device off his ear, and wriggled free out of his duplicate’s grasp. A whirling sound answered his interrogations, and he swore loudly.

_Zeta piercers. Of course. I don’t know who the fucker leading the attack is, but he’s excited to try out all his new toys._

Jango had no idea he would meet the fucker in question ten months down the line - General Grievous would be very surprised to see the best bounty hunter in the galaxy refuse an A-grade mission out of incomprehensible spite, all while muttering something about unfair sleep deprivation and demolition droids.

The flow of soldiers retreating from the monstrous machines was ramifying as the clones fled through the corridors, seemingly without a decided destination.

The man who had grabbed his arm let out a heart-wrenching shriek as a blast of orange plasma hit his back, and he fell to the ground.

Jango watched with wide eyes as the clone’s hands clawed the floor with agonizing tremors. A last surge of energy made his entire body tense, and then it was over.

The bounty hunter felt a new feeling flow through his veins, like icy water on white-hot steel.

He slowly turned his gaze to the death machine which made its way to his position.

“So it’s like that, then.”

He glanced a last time at the fallen clone, fighting back the nausea that climbed up his throat, and he clenched his jaw as the shock was replaced by seething fury. He could have just run away, hidden somewhere, and waited until the storm passed. Reaching Kamino safely was still the top priority, and it would have been the rational thing to do.

But he couldn’t. Not anymore. Not even if it meant risking his life.

_Forgive me, Boba._

Rage fueling him with unstoppable energy, he started running.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Chapter cut in half for the sake of readability, do feel free to make a break and grab a hot chocolate before proceeding to part 2!)


	3. The Versatility of Cocoa (part 2)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (And here we go.)

“To the Lounge! Get back, you idiot!”

Jango grabbed the injured clone and pushed him behind with one hand, without stopping to shoot at the continual flow of droids that passed the intersection.

He shot a glance at the timer on his forearm, and loudly swore. It had been less than an hour since he had started taking matters into his own hands, running around the endless corridors to gather the disorganized clones and methodically destroy the invading battalion, and he was already exhausted.

Sweat was dripping from his forehead, and despite the armor’s cooling system, he felt like he was slow-cooking inside the durasteel plates. He pulled the whimpering clone to his feet without any fuss, and shoved him into the arms of two other men who had barricaded themselves behind a pile of destroyed crates.

“The south hallway should be in the clear, ten guys are defending it”, Jango rapidly explained. “Run there, replace those who need it, and hold the place until I get back. You, you go straight to the Lounge, we’ve got med supplies there. Now go!”

The clones didn’t even discuss his orders before fleeing. The bounty hunter shook his head, and quickly retreated to where he had come from. Dooku had been right about communications – or was it the idea of that Khaleesh weirdo who handled the Banking Clan security? Jango couldn’t remember, but he strongly hoped he hadn’t been the one to suggest it. Without contact with their superior officers, soldiers were easily disconcerted, and the clones were no exception. Some had run to the evacuation pods, some to the arsenal, some had just aimlessly fled through the corridors, trying to outrun the death machines.

Jango had been running up and down the ship for the past hour now, huddling clones towards the Lounge like a herd of confused fully-armored sheep, and securing access ways to it. He would have felt pretty damn proud of himself if time managed to pass a little bit quicker. He wasn’t getting any younger, and two more hours at this pace sounded fairly undoable.

He jumped out of the way of a destroyer, rolled back to his feet with feline grace, only winced a bit when his joints creaked, and shot a maximum-powered blast at a precise point of the droid’s hull.

The machine bewilderedly started spinning onto itself, tripped over its own feet, and fell back.

Jango hadn’t even stopped running.

“Hot springs”, he muttered. “I don’t care where we’re going on holiday, but it’s gonna have hot springs. And screw it, a couple of masseuses too.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a bunch of white armors on his right.

_But first, I have to save the day._

He roamed the area for fifteen more minutes, shouting commands at his duplicates when he ran across them, until a loud signal went through the ship’s speakers.

It was the Dinner Bell, which usually called the clones to the refectory, right next to the Lounge.

“Fucking finally”, the bounty hunter groaned.

He had asked the very first soldiers he had rescued to find a way to contact everyone and pass the message; it looked like they had managed to break into the ship’s automatic commands after all.

He took a few seconds to catch his breath and swipe his forehead, and bit his lip as he thought.

He had done everything he could to gather the clones; there might be some left across the ship, but the droids were swarming in ever greater numbers, and moving around was getting more and more dangerous. It was time to retreat back, and to organize the defenses around the Lounge.

_I hope Ash is back there already. Please, let him be there._

He hadn’t come across his friend, and the corpses that littered the hallways were as anonymous as could be.

It felt wrong, as if none of those deaths mattered at all. As if they weren’t people. As if they were replaceable, expendable, disposable.

Which they were, to everyone else.

_Oh, Jango. What have you done?_

His heart sinking in his chest, he made his way back to the Lounge.

The dozen of soldiers he had dispatched across the south hallway in order to cover their incoming brothers was still there, and a clone with a corporal armband called him as he reached them, with ardent hope in his voice.

“What do we do now?” the officer asked to the underling in dirty, soot-covered armor who smelled like fire and sweat and death.

 _Hell if I know_ , Jango almost replied. Authority was a strange thing. When people were afraid, when they were lost, they were ready to follow anyone who remotely looked like they knew what they were doing.

He really hoped he knew what he was doing.

“You stay here”, he answered firmly. “Now that the signal has come through, more people might come, so we need this access covered until we’re sure there is no one left. Do you need backup?”

“A few more guys on the right flank could be useful.”

“I’ll get in and dispatch some. Keep holding up. We’re halfway there.”

 _How fucking comforting_ , he scolded himself as he moved into the room. _Only one and a half hour to go, what great news!_

He felt a knot in his stomach as he gazed across the Lounge.

_So few._

There couldn’t be more than a hundred clones in the large room, some lying on the benches with people giving them first-aid, some wandering around with desperate looks. It was a troubling thing to see your own face so distressed.

He couldn’t see Ash, but it didn’t mean anything. A lot of people had kept their helmets on, and there were also the ones outside covering the exits. Ash had to be there somewhere.

Two clones were frantically typing on a datapad at a table, and one of them loudly exclaimed:

“It’s done! We got access to the security cams!”

“Great job, buddy.” The bounty hunter patted him on the arm and glanced at the monitor. “Can you try and see if there are still brothers out there who need a hand?”

The clone gleefully nodded, and Jango made his way to the tap counter. He poured himself a huge glass of disgustingly gelatinous and delightfully cold Shoko-Shake, and walked to another group who was gathered around a crackling holocom.

“Did you manage to fix the communications?” he asked while putting the cold glass against his aching temples.

“Not yet, sir. I tried to do the thing you told me with the radio controller, and it worked for a moment, but then it came back.”

“Then there are several. They can’t have equipped all droids with it”, Jango mused out loud”, that shit is expensive… Maybe it’s just the officers?”

“How did you know how to deactivate those?” Wolffe asked as he looked up from the holocom he was trying to fix.

“I didn’t”, he lied. “It just seemed logical. And worth a shot.”

“It was”, Wolffe agreed. “And if we get out of here alive, it’s gonna be damn useful for the next gear upgrades. How are things outside?”

“We’re handling it. We need a few more men to cover the hallway, though.”

“Triss, Stealth, you go”, Wolffe ordered. “Dawn, do you think-“

A loud scream cut the lieutenant as one of camera-watching clones jumped to his feet.

“ _They’re coming!”_

“Oh, fucking hell”, groaned Jango. “I’m assuming you’re not talking about the reinforcements?”

“They have one of these zeta droids too!”

“What? I destroyed that thing!” the bounty hunter protested incredulously.

It had only taken him a well-placed hand grenade and an insane amount of adrenaline. Demolition droids weren’t very good at precise shooting, and as it turned out, they didn’t know how to react to an enemy who came their way while zigzagging and screaming at the top of their lungs.

Jango wasn’t too proud about the screaming, but he was damn sure that he had blasted the bloody thing into droid heaven, if there was such a thing.

“Well, they sent in one more! And there’s a whole squadron of destroyers!”

“You know what?” the bounty hunter said to no one in particular. “That’s it. I hate the Separatists.”

“Don’t we all”, Wolffe said. “Alright. Let’s not panic. We can do this.”

There was distinct concern in the officer’s voice, and Jango felt a surge of affection for his duplicate.

“Damn right we can”, he asserted. “We have wits, we have courage, we have Shoko-shake, and we have big fucking guns. We can hold them back.”

Wolffe gave him a thankful look.

“How many men are still out there, Sky?” he asked to the monitor-watching clone.

“I can’t see any, Sir”, Sky answered apologetically. “There’s clankers everywhere.”

“Then it’s time to seal the exits”, Wolffe said slowly.

Jango felt the heartbreak in the lieutenant’s voice. They were thinking about the same thing. If there were clones outside who were still trying to make their way to the Lounge, they would die in front of a closed door.

Then another thought popped into the bounty hunter’s head.

“No”, he said out loud.

“What?”

“We can’t seal all the exits”, he stated as his mind ran full speed. “Look, they are droids. They are stupid. They follow a program. If they find all exits sealed, they are going to send in that fucking zeta piercer, and I’m out of stamina for the day. But if there’s an entrance open, only one, they will make their way to it.”

“And then what?” Wolffe asked incredulously. “We hold the door open to them?”

“No. Then we grill them. Trust me.”

He held the officer’s gaze for a few seconds before Wolffe nodded.

 _These little shits are not gonna know what hit them_ , he thought merrily as he walked back outside. His head was feeling dizzy, as if he was tipsy from adrenaline and exhaustion. It was going to be easy. They would lure the droids to the north entrance, barricade behind those ugly benches, and just put all of these clanking shits through a good old-fashioned flame-throwing hell.

He didn’t understand why he hadn’t thought of it before. Flames solved everything.

He fondly patted his wrist, where his flame-thrower was not.

_The armor._

Jango stopped walking with a foot mid-air as reality dawned on him.

_Oh, no._

He had included a flame-thrower on the clone armor, surely? He was sure he had. It had to be there. It was definitely not there. Wolffe was staring at him strangely, and he gave him his best smile, all teeth out and shining.

_We are going to die. What the hell was I thinking? Who designs armor without a flame-thrower?_

He turned away from Wolffe to make sure he didn’t see his face, and allowed himself three full seconds of complete panic before breathing it away.

_Alright. I can make this right. My plan makes sense. I just need a flame-thrower. Something to throw flames. A thing that makes flames you can throw._

He looked around desperately, somehow hoping that one might just materialize in front of him, that something would give him an idea, an inspiration…

The lights were flickering on top of his head, and he shot them an annoyed glance.

Then it hit him.

_I can make one. My blaster can hold it. I just need fuel._

“You”, he ordered one of the clones. “Come over here.”

He grabbed an empty water canister, then climbed up the man’s shoulders with uncertain balance, and steadied himself against the ceiling.

On the other side of the room, a loud clanking indicated that Wolffe had sealed the entrances. Sky was restlessly watching his monitor, his voice trembling:

“You were right, they’re heading for the north entrance! They’ll be here soon!”

“ _Soon_ isn’t helpful. Countdown!” Jango barked as he unscrewed the panels.

Inside the compartment, a tube full of glowing liquid was gently resting. Jango smiled at it with a tenderness he usually reserved to his son and his bank account.

“Forty seconds!”

He carefully unplugged the contacts, and pierced the tube open with as much care as he could.

“Thirty!”

He held the canister steady as the liquid flowed inside it, and he commanded two other clones to replace him as he went down the man’s shoulders, the highly-flammable fuel gently sloping in the can.

“Twenty!”

Sky’s voice was shrill now. Jango made his way to the entrance, where the corporal he had talked to had retreated behind a pile of furniture. He gave him a friendly nod, then fitted a tube to his modified blaster’s shooting chamber, and plunged the other end into the canister.

_I have fuel, I have aim, I have fire. Too much fire, maybe?_

“Ten!”

The blaster would never hold this kind of heat for long. He needed a coolant of some sort.

His gaze fell onto the Shoko-shake glass.

_Screw it._

“They’re here!”

His weapon coated in chocolate-scented gelatin, and surrounded by people he shouldn’t have cared about, Jango Fett pulled the trigger.

\----

“So, we fixed the holocom”, Sky said as he sat next to him. “Wolffe is talking to Captain Rex, he’s briefed him about the whole sitch. You holding up?”

“Yeah”, Jango replied as he cracked his neck. “Refill me?”

“Sure”, Sky said.

He pushed a full canister to the bounty hunter’s feet, and quickly changed the tube.

“Thanks”, said the bounty hunter as he kept carbonizing the droids who passed the intersection.

The hallway was full of fuming droid carcasses, to the point where the incoming machines were having trouble walking towards the entrance.

“How long before they change plans, you think?” Sky yawned as Jango splashed a droidekas with searing-hot lighting fuel. At his side, Stealth cheered and enthusiastically proceeded to blast its remains.

“When they can’t walk anymore, I think.”

“Maybe let them pull out the broken ones before barbecuing their ass the next time?”

“Sure.”

“Cool. Is there anything else you need?”

“Can you try and see if there’s a guy named Ash here?”

“Will do. You have a thing for fire-related stuff, don’t you?”

“Yep.”

Sky patted his shoulder as he went away, and the bounty hunter smiled for himself. The whole situation was one of the weirdest he had ever experienced, but somehow it felt right.

Even alone and unarmed and in the middle of a battle that wasn’t his, he was still Jango Fucking Fett.

Boba would be proud of him.

“Wait a second, I’ll ask.“ he heard behind him. “Hey, Dawn.”

“Yep.”

Wolffe knelt at his side and shot an appreciative look at the rampaged hallway.

“I have Rex on the line, they are coming as fast as they can. They should be here in half an hour. How are things for you?”

“Good. I can do this all day. I’m just hoping they don’t change plans.”

“In case they do, I’ve set up two teams to guard the other entrances, but I think we’re covered. They won’t get through the seals.”

“They have a zeta piercer. That goes through anything.”

“Apparently, they called it back. Not sure why, but I’m taking any good news I get.”

“Well”, Jango pondered. “I did kick the shit out of one with a single hand grenade, and they cost about twenty thousand credits per unit. If you want to win the war, you gotta watch your budget.”

“Soldier Dawn, the nightmare of Separatist accountants”, Wolffe commented.

Jango smiled.

_You have no idea. Gunray’s assistant had to take a medical leave at the last invoice I sent him._

“Do you think you can hold them for thirty more minutes?”

The bounty hunter took a moment to think. He saw the trust in the lieutenant’s eyes, the concentration on Stealth’s face as the clone kept shooting. He made complicated volume calculations about lighting tubes and canisters. He took in the smell of cold sweat, charred cocoa and the burnt leather from his gloves.

He looked at Wolffe straight in the eye, and answered in a deadpan tone:

“I’m going to need another Shoko-Shake.”

\---

The main bay had been cleaned, and it looked stranger than anything Jango ever recalled seeing.

After the noise and fury of the last hours, the clinical quiet of the room just seemed out of place. He shot a look at Captain Rex, who was standing on the podium and finishing his report to the holograms of some Nautolan Jedi Master and a Kaminoan man.

Wolffe was behind him, looking haggard and a bit lost.

Rex had done a great job of the rescue, Jango had to admit. It had taken him only ten minutes to jump in a cruiser with a full battalion of clones, and only then, to let the Jedi know that he was on his way to help a medical ship – apparently, Rex wasn’t the type who asked for permission before acting. They had blasted their way through the asteroid belt in order to get to the ship quicker, and once they had arrived, they had made small work of the Separatist cruiser. The leaders of the attack had fled, but they had still gotten the pleasure to torpedo the Geonosian starfighter into oblivion.

Jango had seen the freshly-arrived clones fire their way towards the Lounge, and things had been a bit of a blur after that.

He had almost passed out from exhaustion and dehydration at some point, and someone had wrapped bacta bandages around his blistered palms.

Now he was sitting on the floor among the two hundred and twelve survivors as Rex and Wolffe reported to a sagely-nodding Force guy who had sat thousands of parsecs away from the attack.

A lot of clones had managed to barricade themselves in the sleeping areas, apparently, but from all everyone was saying, the Lounge had been at the core of the battle.

He still hadn’t seen Ash yet.

Rex cleared his throat and turned to the crowd before switching his mic on.

“Alright. Captain Rex for global channel, this is a casualty report for the official record. Have died on medical ship Stargazer on this day, in the line of duty: CT-1156, named Leak; CC-8989, named Falcon; CC-3456…”

Jango listened incredulously as the list went on, and on, and on.

_This is it?_

Nausea came climbing up his throat. A casualty report. All those men who had fought at his side, who had run and struggled and died, all those people who had given their life because of an insane war, they were just this now. This was all they had. A quick incineration in the indifferent darkness of space, and a bunch of IDs thrown into the void as a careless Jedi listened for form’s sake and a Kaminoan clerk removed them from the GAR files.

All of their fight, all of their energy, all of their lives, it all came down to this.

A mindless list which went on, and on, and on.

He almost felt like screaming, and only the thought of Boba stopped him from jumping on his feet.

_This is not your fight. Lay low. Shut up. Find him and fly away, as far from here as you can._

“CC-1748, named Wess…”

Senator Amidala’s not-so-secret admirer, Jango recalled with a weight on his chest. He wondered if she would have cared.

_Yes, she would have._

“CT-1818, named Blue; CC-6968, named Ash; CT-…”

“No”, Jango blurted out in a breathless whisper.

_No. No. There has to be another Ash. It’s a common name. It is. It has to be._

The list went on and on, and the bounty hunter felt his throat tighten, so hard that he couldn’t inhale anymore. The world was spinning around him.

_We have to meet for breakfast. It can’t be him. It can’t._

It was another minute of endless names before Rex put the datapad down.

“End of casualty report.”

“Thank you, Captain”, the Jedi said softly. “We are all very sorry for these losses, but are glad that the rest of you survived. We will leave you to your recovery.”

The hologram faded away, and Jango couldn’t help but laugh, a hoarse and ugly laugh which shook his shoulders until bitter tears came streaming from his eyes.

_This is it. This is all it is. This is it, really._

One of the clones held him a tissue, and squeezed his shoulder.

Rex was saying something to Wolffe now, and the lieutenant nodded. The captain gave him a brief embrace, and jumped down the podium, leaving the survivors among themselves.

Wolffe came forward, and around Jango, all the clones stood up.

Holding his breath, he did the same.

The lieutenant touched a few commands on his wrist, and the room went dark. There was only the faint glow of the stars now, softly shimmering in the distance, far above the transparent ceiling.

Jango looked up, and found them beautiful. He hadn’t looked at the stars in a long time, he realized.

Then, like fireflies at dusk, tiny beads of light ignited the crowd as the clones turned on their position signals.

They were small ignescent spheres, that let out a soft glow of variable color, and that every clone had in their armor pouches. The bounty hunter had designed them for long-distance night communications.

In the starlight-filled room, they looked like pearls of gold.

An ethereal gleam was surrounding all of the faces reflecting his own, and Jango waited, his breath taken away.

“They were our brothers”, Wolffe said in a throaty voice. “They fell, but they are not forgotten.”

“They are not forgotten”, all the clones repeated in a strangely powerful chorus.

“Their legacy lives, for we remember.”

“We remember.”

Jango found his voice mixing with those of his duplicates this time, and he looked down at his own light sphere. His heart was beating faster.

On the far right of the room, one of the clones turned his signal red, and he spoke in the warm sanguine light.

“Falcon was my brother. He liked to make up stupid stories and to play them out with pieces of toast. He is remembered.”

“He is remembered”, the others muttered.

Jango felt an unreal peace settle in his heart as he listened. One name after the other, the clones spoke up, talking about their fallen brothers.

It was nothing like any funeral ceremony he had ever seen, but it felt right. When nobody had granted them with an identity, the memory of their names was all they had left.

And remembering felt like the only possible rebellion.

With a sudden impulse, Jango pressed his light red.

“Ash was my brother”, he said. “He was hilarious and he had a new knee that squeaked like a kojan mouse.”

“Ash was my brother too”, a clone added with a nostalgic smile. “He sneaked out after curfew to bring us jelly sandwiches from the kitchen.”

A few other men exchanged their memories, and Jango took a minute to silently address his friend.

 _Thanks for everything, buddy_.

The clones kept going on through the night as the ship approached Kamino, names being spoken, stories exchanged and tears shed. They talked about how Wess had had a crush on Senator Amidala since he was a cadet, how Tap used to make up songs during practice, how Leak once slapped a nexu during a training mission out of sheer panic.

When each and every one of the fallen clones had been discussed, Wolffe spoke again.

“Though on this day they are gone, they remain with us. The lights of the fallen shine bright in the darkness, and in their name we will keep up the fight, until the day we meet again. May our brothers have found peace.”

“May they have found peace.”

Sadness overcame Jango as he looked around. The golden lights were shut down, one by one.

He was the last one to turn his off.

The darkness didn’t last, though. Far above their heads, a sunbeam penetrated the night, bright and pink and soft.

Dawn was breaking over Kamino.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, that was a long one. Bit more bittersweet too I guess, war is a nasty matter after all…  
> The next chapter will come as soon as possible with new adventures and new friends (Rex is gonna stick around for a while).  
> Hope you enjoyed it, feel free to feed me with comments and kudos, they absolutely fuel me!


	4. The Awkwardness of Brothership

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello folks! Chapter 3 (well, now it’s 4) was a bit delayed due to the author spending the last days curled up in a little ball of bitterness. Lots of cuddles to my American readers, stay strong – I’m assuming than no one following the adventures of Bisexual POC Single Dad voted for the Orange Dickwad. (If you did, I hope you get run over by a truck. And I suggest you depart before getting a CVA from the amount of Space Gay and Diversity Loving here.)  
> Anyway, here we go!

The lights were blinking like epileptic lampyrids, and Jango felt a drop of sweat run down his forehead as he kept his position, kneeling behind the duracrete panel.

The wound in his belly was unpleasantly tickling, as if ice ants were crawling around the fresh scar, but he didn’t dare to move.

“On my mark…”

The bounty hunter exhaled deeply, and resisted the urge to adjust his aim. The rifle was already perfectly positioned.

“Shoot!”

The lamps went suddenly out, and Jango pulled the trigger ten times, his body entirely still save for his elbow as he adjusted each shot.

“And… time out! Alright kiddos, let’s see what we got here.”

 He sighed deeply as tension left his shoulders, and unceremoniously proceeded to scratch the damned scab, which made Stealth snicker at his side.

“Very dignified, Dawn.”

“Screw you, mate”, Jango amiably replied.

The clone punched him in the shoulder, and cracked his neck.

“So, how many do you think you got?”

“I’m not sure”, Jango lied. “It’s hard to focus with those flashes of light.”

“That’s the whole point”, the training sergeant commented with a smile. “Even with your helmets, you can find yourself in difficult luminosity settings during a fight, and you shouldn’t let it distract you.”

“I thought the helmets had automatic light enhancement”, Stealth muttered as he grabbed his result sheet, where a disheartening “2/10” was printed.

“It’s not immediate”, the bounty hunter absent-mindedly replied. “The sensors need a second to adjust the internal screen. It’s enough to get shot.”

“Not that you would know anything about helmets, Mister Naked-Head.”

“I told you, I had something smudged on the visor”, he protested. “I couldn’t see anything.”

“That doesn’t seem to be a problem for you today”, Sergeant Boost appreciatively said as he gave Jango his own sheet.

He didn’t refrain a smile at the “8/10” score on top of the sheet. Truth be told, the hardest thing had been to miss two targets, but he didn’t dare over-perform too much. CC-6217’s results had always been averagely good, and even a life-changing fighting experience would not explain him becoming a perfect marksman overnight.

Given his recent prowess on the Stargazer, mediocre test results weren’t an option either, which Jango was glad about. Purposely shooting outside the target had made him cringe.

“Congratulations, Riley. That’s way better than last time.”

“Riley?”

Stealth frowned. Jango felt his heart skip a beat, and internally screeched a string of curses.

It had finally happened. Someone remembered the man whose place he had taken. To his horror, he felt blood rushing to his face, and fervently hoped that the sweat from effort would hide it.

_Keep calm. Just give him the Perfectly Good Explanation. It’s perfectly good. That’s why it’s called like that._

“That’s your name, right?” asked the sergeant, looking puzzled.

“Actually, it’s Dawn now”, he replied while scratching his head. “I changed it after… after Geonosis.”

“Oooh, right”, Boost nodded understandingly. “I heard about the others. I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“Why would you change your name?” Stealth asked suspiciously.

Jango let out an embarrassed sigh.

“This is going to sound mushy as hell, but… we kinda had a thing around dawn. I wanted to… to remember that.”

“Oh. That is mushy as fuck”, Stealth confirmed. “But whatever works for you. And it’s kinda cute, I guess?”

“It is”, the sergeant said with a soft smile. “And hey, if you wanna talk about them… I know what it’s like to lose your squad.”

“Thanks a lot, Sarge.”

“Anytime. And keep practicing; you might get a perfect score next month.”

“Fingers crossed.”

Jango felt his heart rate finally come back to normal, and he discretely exhaled.

_Nailed it. I knew I was amazing at making stuff up. That’ll teach Sugi and her bloody award-worthy performances. Best infiltrator ever, my ass – so what if she once passed for the Earl of Umbara?_

(Admittedly, the Earl in question was male, very old, with a severe case of fireskin disease and a pronounced lisp. Even face-changed Zam had failed to fool the Earl’s entourage – she never quite got speech impediments right. Young, horned, beautiful Sugi, on the other hand, had somehow managed to impersonate him long enough to confine him without raising any suspicion, empty the Treasure Vaults, pass a bill in the Senate, and renew the flame in his marriage. Nobody had ever really understood how, and Sugi’s answer was just a smug “Talent, bitches”, which didn’t help one bit.)

Jango saluted the sergeant and made his way to the refresher, Stealth still walking at his side.

“So Dawn, how did you do that?” the clone complained. “My best score ever is three, and it was the time I had a sneezing fit while shooting. I’m pretty sure if I closed my eyes and shot at random, I wouldn’t do any worse.”

“You should actually try that”, he advised. “It’s not really random, not when it relies on your spatial memory and instinct. Maybe just… make sure nobody is around. Just in case.”

Stealth snorted.

“Very comforting.”

“You’ll get better. If I did, you most certainly can.”

“Maybe. And hey, at least the two of us combined made a perfect score!”

“That’s the spirit.”

Jango winced as they got into the refresher. A dozen of clones were already in, cheerfully chatting while they showered, completely unbothered by their nakedness.

He had strongly argued in favor of privacy when they had designed the common facilities, but the Kaminoans had their own ideas. They were an army, Taun-We had said. The group was what mattered. Marginal individualism was unavoidable, but would not be encouraged. There was no place for modesty among men who were bound to be together in all circumstances.

These were all compelling arguments. None of them had prepared Jango to hang out with his very naked duplicates while washing.

He was no stranger to bared men - in professional and recreational settings alike – but these bore his own body. Although, he couldn’t help noticing with a pinch of vexation, most of the bodies in question were considerably buffer than his own.

He had gotten relatively used to seeing his face everywhere, but it still felt very weird to look at his naked body splashing joyfully in the common showers.

Worst of all, Stealth kept talking to him as they disrobed.

He liked the clone. He really did. They had been assigned to the same recovery group when they had reached Kamino, and over the last two weeks, they had bonded. Stealth was enthusiastic, refreshingly candid, and liked blowing things up. Jango liked that. But it didn’t mean he was any kind of comfortable with the idea of chit-chatting with him while the clone shamelessly scrubbed his private parts clean.

So far, he had managed to take his showers alone, either by going very early or very late, but it looked like the days of privacy were over.

Clenching his jaw and trying very hard to keep his gaze at eye-level, Jango stepped under the water.

He managed to maintain the conversation at a strict minimum as the hot streams hit his shoulders, facing the wall with determination. It wasn’t that terrible, he managed to convince himself. _Nothing here I haven’t seen before, and for much longer than any of them. I’ll wash really quickly, then get out of here and forget this ever happened._

“Hey, Dawn!” a clone called behind him.

_Or I could just murder everyone in this room._

“Hmm?” he grumbled without moving.

“What happened to your back? These are some weird scars.”

Jango felt his heart skip a beat. He had forgotten about the whipping marks. These were old, older than any of them. He doubted clones could precisely date a scar by observation only, but modesty wasn’t worth the risk; he begrudgingly turned around.

Nobody here seemed to have an issue about displaying their bits, but he still felt his cheeks burn with embarrassment.

“I have no idea”, he muttered. “Geonosis fucked me up pretty bad.”

“This one is something, too”, Stealth said while pointing at his belly.

_Oh, kriffing hell. Isn’t it punishable by death to point at parts of your naked shower neighbour? It should be._

_“_ Almost looks like you were stabbed by a lightsaber”, another commented while lathering shampoo into his hair.

Jango laughed loudly.

“I know, right?” he joked with a huge fake smile. “Fucking Jedi.”

The other clones chortled, and he glanced at the scab. The medics had managed to fix him pretty well, but it was still sensitive, and every look at it brought back the memory like a vivid flash.

The searing pain through his body. The satisfied look on Windu’s face. The smell of burnt meat – the tears streaming down Boba’s face – the howl of his son his son his son…

_Two weeks._

It had been fourteen days since he had arrived on Kamino, since Ash and the chocolate-smelling fire and the lights of the fallen. It seemed like an eternity.

He still hadn’t found Boba.

Jango closed his eyes, and tilted his head back to let the strong streams hit his forehead, dripping on his clenched jaw. Anxiety was driving him insane. He had thought it would be easy. He had imagined that, somehow, he would just stumble upon his son somewhere or recognize him instantly out of the hundreds of same-aged children wandering in the city.

So far, he hadn’t.

He had started at his former apartment, walking by innocently to try and see whether Boba had left him any clues. He had asked around for the cadet called Lucky who had saved his life. He had volunteered to watch over a group of younglings on their shooting initiation. Nothing had paid off, and he was getting seriously worried.

He kept thinking about what Wess and Ash, bless their precious souls, had said in the Lounge. None of his enquiries about the Rejection had taught him more than he already knew – it was a rumor, or maybe it wasn’t, or maybe it was. Misbehaving clones mysteriously vanished, and you should watch your tongue, and never ever disobey orders, or at least don’t get caught, Dawn, alright?

Jango had found nothing on the specifics of the Rejection, but if there was indeed an internal program aiming to get rid of outliers… what would happen to a cadet who had allegedly sneaked on a battle dropship instead of going to class?

He was getting nightmares at the idea.

He didn’t know either how Boba could have managed to fit amidst the clones. Unlike him, he didn’t have an identification number, nor a dead squad whom few remembered.

 _Where are you?_ he wondered. _Are you alright?_

Hoping that Boba was fine and searching for him as well was his only lead at this point – he kept telling people about the Lucky cadet, and hoped that word would come to his son’s ears. Maybe the kid would be better at finding him than he was.

If he was safe. If he was here. If he hadn’t gotten in trouble for saving his life.

It was too many ifs for Jango’s taste.

He absent-mindedly followed the clones as they dried up and got dressed, before heading to the refectory. He was pretty sure that the Kaminoan files had to mention the Cadet Who Had Slipped Away, given that he had been shipped back to the planet, but as a simple soldier, he didn’t have access to them. And hacking into a top-notch security system with a basic datapad had proven impossible.

No matter how he turned the problem inside his head, he was stuck. At the very least, he needed to find Carrots again and get to the bottom of that Rejection thing.

“Hey, Dawn? You with us?” Stealth asked with his mouth full.

“Should we get you two a room?” his neighbour – Jesse, Jango recalled – asked with a grin.

“What?”

“You’ve been staring at Tup for the past ten minutes. Keep your mushy mush out of lunch time, I’m begging you.”

“You’re just jealous”, the clone named Tup replied with a playful smile, brushing back his flowing long hair.

“Erm”, Jango cleared his throat awkwardly. “Sorry. I was… thinking about… stuff.”

“ _Stuff_?” Jesse smirked.

Tup laughed out loud.

“Leave him alone, you prick. I’m the prettiest of us all, it’s normal to feel dazzled at my sight.”

“The prettiest?” Stealth snorted.

“Dazzled?” Jango repeated.

“We literally all look the same, Tup”, Jesse said while rolling his eyes.

“Sorry, kids. I’m the one pulling out best the trademark Fett rugged good looks.”

Jango opened his mouth, then slowly closed it back.

“The what now?” he whispered softly.

Jesse, Stealth and a few other clones groaned in chorus.

“The Original didn’t wear a bun, Tup”, one of them remarked.

“So?” Tup shrugged. “He would have rocked it.”

Jango lowered his head until his forehead rested on the table, and started to giggle uncontrollably.

_Thank the stars nobody is here to hear that conversation. Sugi would never let me forget it._

“Look, guys, I can’t help it if you sorry oafs have zero sense of style. I’m just making the most of our prettiness.”

“I’m sure Fett would have appreciated that”, the bounty hunter couldn’t help commenting.

“Right? I mean, the guy was picked as Face of the Republic for a reason.”

“I’m fairly sure he was chosen for his competences”, Jango protested despite himself.

Tup shook his head.

“What, you mean his fighting skills? Nah. That’s not passed through genetics. And even if he had an amazing metabolism, that’s not enough a reason. I’m telling you, it’s the looks.”

“It _is_ in the manual”, Jesse conceded. “ _You have a famed face, agreeable and trustworthy, and that face is a tool as such_.”

“I don’t remember seeing that in the manual”, Jango feebly said.

“Did you skip Civilian Interaction training? There’s a whole chapter on what our face expresses and what behaviours it can elicit.”

“Meaning we’re hot stuff and getting a clone smooch is on the to-do list of many”, Stealth translated.

_I most certainly never wrote that. Taun-We must have added it. Well, that’s another woman I can’t ever face again._

“It’s logical, too. If they had just wanted good warriors, they could have picked a Trandoshan as template. These reptile guys are _something_.”

“And Tup would have the best-looking scales in the galaxy”, Jesse said with a sardonic smile.

“Damn right I would.”

\---

Jango was softly banging his head on the library desk, mulling over strategies to find Boba and trying his best not to think about what would happen if he didn’t, when he felt a soft pat on his back.

“Am I interrupting some sort of courtship ritual between you and that table, or can I sit here?”

The bounty hunter raised his head, and smiled at the newcomer.

“Hey, Rex. The table’s not very responsive, so I’m giving up on the courtship. You can sit.”

“Very kind of you”, the captain said with a wry smile.

Jango moved on the bench to let his clone sit down, genuinely pleased to see him. They had met during the post-Stargazer debriefing; Rex had asked him numerous questions about his artisanal flame-thrower, with a mix of interested professionalism and candid fascination. They had shared a few drinks, bonded over their love for derring-do and awful puns, and before he knew it, the lonesome bounty hunter had counted yet another friend. It was getting distressing.

“What’s up? You don’t come here very often.”

“Compared to you, nobody does, Mister Dataworm”, Rex replied. “I’m meeting with the Jedi tomorrow, I wanted to do some background checks to make sure I don’t screw things up.”

Jango felt a surge of fondness for his anxious clone.

“Aww, Rex. You, screwing something up? I doubt that.”

“It’s the first time I’m actually gonna see them. Holo-chatting is not the same. I heard they can read your mind when they look you in the eye. What if I think of something stupid?”

“They don’t read minds like that, Rex”, Jango said, but wariness was coming over him. Jedi knew an imposter when they saw one, and he had no doubt his presence in the Force was very different from that of his clones…

“What if I get an itchy butt and I can’t think of anything else?” Rex continued with growing dismay. “Oh, stars, what if they’re really pretty and I picture them naked?”

“Rex, calm down.”

“And what if a song gets stuck in my head and they check me up and my mind is just _Ooh-Ahh-it’s the tooka-tooka_?”

“Rex, that’s not… Ooh-Ahh the tooka-tooka?”

“You don’t know it? It’s infectious. Goes like this: Ooh-Ahh, here it goes, Ooh-Ahh, pointy-pointy nose…”

“Rex, buddy, pal”, Jango firmly cut him. “Jedi don’t read minds, and you are not the type to think of a nursery rhyme while meeting with your superiors.”

“Nursery rhyme? It’s a party hit.”

“It is? Well, now I know why I despise parties.”

“You should have a bit more fun, Dawn. You know what? I’m taking you to the next get-together. The tooka-tooka dance is pretty cool.”

“I am _not_ learning the tooka-tooka dance.”

“You are, soldier. That’s a direct order.”

“With all due respect, captain, I’d rather get Rejected.”

Rex shook his head with a smile in his brown eyes.

“That’s not a thing, kiddo. Just a story that cadets tell each other for the spooks.”

“Here’s hoping you’re right”, Jango sighed.

“I am. And I’m teaching you the tooka-tooka if I survive tomorrow’s meeting.”

“What has my life become?” the bounty hunter wondered. “Ugh. Fine. Do you need help with your Jedi checks?”

“Actually, yeah, I could use a hand. There’s a dozen of them coming up to meet us, and I’d like to make a good impression.”

“You are aware that they know you already.”

“Yes, but still. I wanna know who’s who, what they’ve done, what to talk about with them… Imagine one of them hates a thing, and I bring it up. I don’t want to be an embarrassment, is all.”

Jango reached across the table, and put his hands on his duplicate’s shoulders.

“Rex. Captain. Brother. You are not, and will never be, an embarrassment to anyone. You are a brilliant man, and I am glad I got to meet you. If anything, it’s the Jedi who should be worried of not being worthy of your command.”

Rex clutched his hand with a brave smile.

“Thanks, Dawn. You ain’t too bad yourself.”

“Now let’s get you some intel on those bloody lightsaber-wielding monks.”

“Hey, don’t disrespect them. They’re the heart of the Republic.”

“Sorry”, Jango frowned. “I’m just a little bit pissed that they rejected the request to add a flamethrower to our armors on the ground that it’s _“a barbaric weapon”._ When you think of the lives it would save…”

“I feel you”, Rex nodded. “I saw the holos of your defense on the Stargazer, that was some amazing textbook material. And, you know. Really freaking rad, too.”

“Coming from people who use mind tricks and scathing-hot sticks, it’s a bit outrageous.”

“Maybe they’ll come around it”, the captain said with a smile. “Wait. So they _do_ read minds?”

“No. But they can manipulate them, to an extent. If you are easily influenced or not very resolute, they can put you under a mental impulse.”

 _Weak minds_ , the Jedi called them. Jango hated that expression. Minds weren’t meant to be strong or weak or whatever else. They were minds, and that was it.

“So…” Rex slowly said. “They could make me do things? Like a puppet?”

“I doubt anyone could make you do something you don’t want”, Jango said with what would prove to be an amazing perspicuity.

“Do they do that often?” the captain insisted with badly-hidden uneasiness.

The bounty hunter hesitated. His despise for the Jedi was as strong as ever, and he liked seeing Rex doubt them as well, but he didn’t want to bring his clone any trouble with his upcoming meeting.

“I don’t know”, he replied quite honestly. “On animals, a lot – makes them safer to handle. On people… it’s a bit unethical. I think it’s more of a last-option thing?”

The clone looked relieved, and scratched his shaven head.

“See? That’s the kind of stuff I need to know. Cody just told me not to worry. That’s easy for him.”

“Cody is right”, Jango said as he looked over the list of incoming Jedi. _No Windu. Good._

“Dawn, you’re supposed to be on my side.” Rex complained.

“Sorry, captain. I stand with you.”

“That’s more like it.”

“Also, Commander Cody is fucking right, sir.”

They searched through the holonet and the Kaminoan archives for the next hour, compiling data to reassure Rex. Jango was wondering if he ought to ask the captain for help to find Boba or Carrots, and how to formulate it to sound as casual as possible.

_Just be smooth about it. No big deal. Just asking my captain about a cadet. Nothing weird about that._

“Hey, Rex?” he prudently asked the clone, who was frantically reading Master Unduli’s record.

“Dawn, what is a Subterrean Distorted Megasaurus and how does one _tame_ it?”

“With a balanced mix of treats and firm slaps on the nose, I suppose. Can I ask you a favor?”

“Sure. Umm, this must be wrong. Negotiation with the Queen of Almurria? Almurria hasn’t had royalty in millennia.”

“Check the details in local press. So, I’m trying to find a cadet who saved my life on Geonosis, but I haven’t had any luck so far. Could you maybe check the files for me?”

“… It was a ghost. A ghost queen. Because ghosts are a thing. Of course they are.”

Rex pinched the brink of his nose, then looked back at him.

“Sorry. A cadet, you said?”

“Yes”, Jango said. “His name was Lucky, I think. He sneaked on a dropship to help and he saved my life. I just wanted to… to make sure he didn’t get in too much trouble for that.”

“Oooh, yes, I heard about that. I can check, but there was a massive breakdown of the ID system a few weeks ago, it’s not completely fixed yet. I’m not sure I’ll find anything.”

Jango felt a tingle in the back of his neck.

“A breakdown?”

“Yeah. The day after Geonosis, actually. The database completely crashed; we have recovered most of it but there are still a lot of files missing. If the kid’s is among these, there’s nothing I can do.”

 _Oh, Boba_. Jango felt his heart sing with joy. _You smart, precious, wonderful thing._

The kid had probably gathered material from his armor before going to the clones, and he had known how to break into systems since he was eight – it was one of the things he had picked from Cad Bane during the joint missions Jango worked with him, along with a horrifying amount of profane vocabulary.

_At least that’s settled. So much for that lead, though._

“It’s OK”, Jango said. “I just wanted to make sure he was fine. Getting a kid Rejected would be a bummer, I gotta say.”

“Dawn”, Rex sighed as he put down the datapad. “The Rejection is not a thing. And being eager to fight is never frowned upon too bad. Ask Hardcase, if you don’t believe me.”

He pointed at a muscular clone with geometrical tattoos on the side of his head, who was softly snoring at a nearby table.

The bounty hunter hesitated, then went up and poked the man.

He grumbled in his sleep, and opened an eye.

“Hmng? Not sl’ping.”

“Hi”, Jango said. “I’m Dawn. Which means it’s time to rise and shine, buddy.”

Rex chuckled.

“I hate mornings”, Hardcase yawned as he stretched his neck.

“Sorry to hear that. It’s the middle of the afternoon, though. I just have a question, and Rex told me to ask you.”

The clone stiffened and suddenly straightened.

“Cap’n Rex”, he muttered. “I wasn’t sleeping. I’m just here catching up on some learning.”

“Sure you are.”

“So, I’m worried about a kid who sneaked out of Kamino to help with the fighting, and Rex said you knew it wasn’t too frowned upon?”

“Oh, yeah”, Hardcase commented while rubbing his eyes. “I did that when I was small. Winded up on Umbara. It was dope.”

Rex cleared his throat.

“I meaaan”, the clone corrected, “it was completely irresponsible and I learnt my lesson.”

“Were you punished?” Jango asked with horror.

“Spent a week in the detention center and got yelled at by the instructors.”

“Oh.”

“Between you and me”, Hardcase added in a low voice, “it was totally worth it. I met the freaking Shadow Countess.”

“You did?” Jango exclaimed, quite impressed. The Countess was one of the most mysterious people on the shadow planet. Bane kept bragging about the night he had spent with her, but Jango knew for a fact that the night in question had been spent in a prison cell for “inappropriate ogling”. It was amazing the things you could get your lover to confess when he was drunk-drowsing in your bed.

Hardcase nodded with a conniving grin.

“She kissed me on the cheek and she said I’d be a hell of a soldier one day. Then the people we were protecting her from busted in, and she. Kicked. Their. Ass.”

“Yeah, the Umbarans are not exactly people you want to piss off”, the bounty hunter agreed. “That’s really cool. And thanks for the story. You can go back to sleep now.”

“I’m not sleeping. I’m educating myself, just like my instructor said I should.”

“Sure, buddy.”

Jango patted the bald head of his duplicate as he dozed off again.

 _At least Boba should be safe,_ he thought as he went back to Rex. His heart felt lighter, despite knowing that he would need a new plan to find his son.

He also still wanted to talk to Carrots. If Rex was right, which he fervently hoped, then he would just drop the case and enjoy the time among his newly-found friends until he found Boba.

If Rex wasn’t…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit more slow-paced for this chapter… things will start heating up in the next one again, but Jango needed a breather in between.  
> BTW, I’m going to lengthen this compared to what I had planned (up to 10-12 chapters) to take the time to explore some character interaction – with Slick and Fives, among others – and add a few new adventures along the way.  
> I’m also opening writing requests until December! If you have prompts or bits you want to read more on, just say the word :)


	5. The Backlash of Backstroking

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone, I’m back!  
> (Both from long-time travelling and from inspiration/motivation breakdown; I’m gonna try to keep the Writing Machine up and working this time.)  
> Thank you so much for all the kudos and comments, I am absolutely gleaming :D  
> Here’s the sequel of Jango’s adventures, with the first half of what should have been a longer chapter, but it was getting really long so I'm posting the first bit already. (The good news is I've already 4k words more, so the next one should come pretty quick. The less good news is I have definitely given up on trying to keep this a small fic; I have absolutely zero idea on how long it will be or where it’s gonna go, but there’s too many things I want to write that don’t fit in a short&quick narrative. Oh, well. Here goes.)  
> Hope you enjoy!

Jango was staring at the datapad with a puzzling feeling in his heart.

Mandalore, in the melodic yet haughty voice of Duchess Satine, had declared their strict neutrality in the debuting war which was already ravaging the galaxy. The news had put the planet at the heart of media attention during the last day, with so-called experts from all horizons gathering on holovid channels to bicker at each other in condescending tones, not as much out of interest for the matter as for the satisfaction of making themselves heard.

Jango didn’t have an opinion. Hell, he did his best, as a matter of principle, not to have any in politics. It just made things complicated.

Still, it was very weird to suddenly see his remote homeworld under the spotlight, and he couldn’t help thinking about it. He had never liked the Duchess, who was a pacifist to an absurd point – denying Mandalore’s cultural and historical ties with the arts of war was as insane as it was vexing.

But in the growing frenzy which was gnawing at every planet in the galaxy, it looked like a sound choice. The Republic Chancellor had protested vividly, Count Dooku had shrugged it off, while Senator Amidala and Viceroy Gunray had both strongly approved – although it was obviously for different reasons, the two of them must have been mortified to find out that they agreed with each other.

Jango sighed. Politics were getting harder and harder to ignore, it seemed – and it also seemed like he had put his foot in it quite some time ago.

He had never understood the ties that bound Dooku to the creation of the clone army. As a bounty hunter, he had worked very hard to build his notoriety as a reliable and discrete man, who never asked more questions than strictly necessary, but he wasn’t blind either.

He had an excellent memory for people, and the two (poorly) disguised Jedi who had hired him as template were striking enough to remember.

The mousy one with the pasty skin and shaky voice, who kept wringing his hands under the cloak which was meant to hide him, was as far from the usual confidence of Force users as he had ever seen. Jango wouldn’t have guessed he was Force-sensitive if it hadn’t been for the telltale vibrations of the silk-crown sensor in his glove. And for the man’s tendency to fidget with things while slightly levitating them, too.

The other one, however… This one bore nobility all over him. Straight back, crossed legs, draped over the inn’s battered sofa as if it were a silver throne. His voice was soft but imperious, a rich mix of power and seduction, like velvet sliding on iron. It was the voice that Jango had later recognized.

It had been months later, when the news had revealed that Master Dooku, former count of Serenno, was leaving the Jedi order. Jango was on Kamino then, stuck into bed to recover from Taun We’s infamous marrow extraction, and he was bored out of his mind.

In any other circumstances, he might have missed it, and he may even have managed to delete the two cloaked millionaires from his mind. The Kamino job was both the easiest and the best-paid mission he had ever been hired for, which meant that it was seriously fishy, and digging was never a good idea in those cases…

He had strived very hard not to wonder why two Very-Likely-Jedi wanted to commission a clone army based off the one man whose silence was guaranteed, and where the hell the outrageous amount of money came from. He was usually quite picky about his employers’ solvency, but if they were good enough for the Kaminoans…

The truth was, even a man with standards got easily blinded by the prospect of an eight-figure check and a baby.

But there he was, in between jobs, lying in a hospital bed with the sole company of afternoon holovision programs (which would have made him consider the assassin profession if he hadn’t already been one) and the occasional visit of Taun-We, who would invariably comment that he would be up and kicking if only he had let her use her nasty probes.

He didn’t even have someone to call – Sugi and Embo were working an undercover job, Bossk was back on Trandosha for a family meeting (which Jango highly suspected would end in a cheerful bloodbath), and according to Todo, Bane was on a “highly secret mission”, which in the Cad Bane Thesaurus, meant that he was either imprisoned, hospitalized, or stuck in another embarrassing situation of a kind.

So when he had heard the silken voice talk about “philosophical differences with the Jedi Council”, he had turned up the volume, stared at the dark-eyed man on the screen, and… he had dug.

It hadn’t been difficult to find Master Dooku’s record; hundreds of articles reported the former Jedi’s successes, whether on the battlefield or in negotiation salons. If he had had the slightest doubt about his identity, his posture would have wiped them all – the way he sat, the hand gestures… Jango knew it in his heart; this was the man who had hired him in a gloomy back room on Bogden’s moon.

Strange thing, he had mused, that the Jedi who had commissioned a secret army shall leave the Order two months later…

Finding the other one had been slightly more difficult. It had to be another Jedi, but none of them behaved like the intimidated little runt who had sat in his partner’s shadow. It had taken a blurry picture featuring the two of them for Jango to identify him – Dooku standing tall and unimpressed next to half the Rodian aristocracy, and the other hunching slightly behind him, glancing at his fellow Jedi with an expression that certainly didn’t comply with their bloody code.

Jedi Master Sifo-Dyas. A Master of the Council, Jango had realized with astonishment. The difference between his usual demeanor and his attitude when he was next to Dooku was astounding. Gone was the marmoreal sage, the piercing eyes and the aura of quiet strength. The powerful Force user was nothing more than a pitiful pup under the Count’s thumb. Love was a dangerous thing, and a great weapon for those who knew how to wield it.

It couldn’t be all it was, though. Jango couldn’t picture the unlikely duo as some kind of secret couple working together, nor being the hidden hand of the Jedi Council. Sifo-Dyas’ nervousness had told him as much – this was Dooku’s doing, and his only… yet why would he need to involve a member of the Jedi Council if they were going behind their backs?

The thought had sent a shiver down his spine, one that reminded him of a day of his youth, long ago. He had been swimming for hours, fighting the currents and exploring the wonderful reefs, carried offshore by the warm waves, going further and further and further… until he had found himself floating over a rift, the waters suddenly dark and deep and unending. His heart pounding in his chest, he had gazed down the abyss for a while - the depths calling him closer - every nerve in his body begging him to flee… And slowly, he had backed off.

That moment had felt the same. It wasn’t his business. He was being paid, this was all that mattered.

Again, he had backed off.

And again, three months later, when he heard that Master Sifo-Dyas had died in a mysterious ship crash. Still not his business (though he wondered what the dark-eyed, soft-voiced man had been doing on that day). Still being paid (though he wasn’t sure by whom anymore). And he had other matters to attend to, like learning to put diapers the right way round.

Eight years had then passed without feeling the rift under his feet, although he frequently found himself thinking about that fateful day. And then news had started to report the birth of a Separatist movement led by Count Dooku of Serenno.

He had wondered for half a second, and pushed the thought under a mental rug. Back off, swim away, don’t ask – don’t _think._

Another year until the depths called him again. Dooku had invited a few bounty hunters on Serenno, and he hadn’t dared refusing. Unrelated job, it had to be unrelated – except it wasn’t. The Banking Clan Administration was there, and the Corellian Corporation, and Viceroy Gunray – Jango had worked a number of jobs for the man, and he was in a chatty mood, and it wasn’t long before he learnt that the Separatists were building an army and preparing for open war.

He had felt the rift all around him then, as if swimming away had been for nothing - a flowing darkness above his head, a silent pressure he was only noticing now, but which had always been there, softly catching up, entrapping him, drowning the light…

Gunray had looked so happy about the whole thing. So proud of himself. Poor sod.

 _What kind of man arms both sides of a war?_ he had silently wondered.

For a moment, he had thought maybe it was all a mistake – maybe it wasn’t Dooku who had hired him after all. And then the Count had come in, and he had known.

He could have asked him. He could have told the man that he knew, that he wanted to know. But one look into the dark, dark eyes – deep as the rift, and cold, so cold, how did Sifo-Dyas not notice that? – and once again, he had felt the shiver up his spine, the instinctive need to flee and never to look back. Besides, he had Boba now. He couldn’t take stupid risks for the sake of curiosity – and antagonizing the Count sounded like a very, very stupid mistake to do.

He had backed off. Again.

And now the war had started and people were dying ( _his_ people, some part of him corrected – men who could have been his son, men who called him brother, men who somehow were _family_ ) and he could feel the rift again.

_What do I do?_

_What can I do?_

“Do the tooka-tooka groove, do you know- _how-it-moves_?” someone hooted in his ear.

Jango jumped in surprise, banged both his kneecaps into the table, and loudly swore.

“Nope. It does not move like that”, Rex snickered.

“For kriff’s sake, Captain”, Jango grumbled while rubbing his knees. “Don’t sneak up on people like that!”

“It’s good for your training, soldier. Are you questioning your captain’s training expertise?”

“I’m questioning my captain’s musical taste, sir. And his general sanity.”

Rex chortled, and sat on the bench next to him.

“Insubordination. I’m still teaching you the dance, Dawn.”

“I thought you had forgotten about that”, the bounty hunter whined.

“I never forget anything. Let alone when it concerns the anthem of happiness.”

“The… You know, someone is gonna have to introduce you to real music.”

“Ta-ta-ta. Just embrace the tooka-tooka.”

Jango hit his head against the table, and sighed deeply.

“I take it your Jedi meeting went well?”

“Sooooo well”, Rex beamed, looking like a tiny beacon of joy. “They were as nervous as us, so it felt awkward for about ten seconds, but then Master Kenobi started laughing and we just ended up chatting with each other and it was sooo interesting…”

Jango listened with growing amusement as Rex excitedly related the entire meeting. He had felt a pinch of worry when he had learnt that Kenobi would be among the visiting Jedi, but he had managed not to come across him, and to be honest, he didn’t feel much animosity towards the man. They had fought, and the Jedi had proven himself a worthy opponent, but he had also been polite, courteous, and he hadn’t formulated any threat or critics about his son – three traits that earned Jango’s sympathy.

Rex seemed rather fond of him too, from what he was hearing.

“… and Master Unduli, you know, she looks really stern and severe and I was a little scared of talking to her at first but I think she’s pretty cool on the inside…”

“Really?” Jango was surprised. From what he had heard, Luminara Unduli wasn’t exactly what you might call ‘cool’. Or maybe in a meteorological way, as in ‘mildly cold with a chance of ice storms’.

“Well I asked her about the Subterrean Megasaurus, you remember that?”

“Yeah?”

“She named him Billy.”

Jango nearly choked on laughter as Rex continued.

“So yeah, they’re gonna start working on the affectations, but I think it should go pretty well. How about you? What do you got there?”

“It’s the news”, he shrugged. “Mandalore declaring their neutrality, you know?”

“Yeah, I heard”, Rex waved a hand. “But what language is it in?”

 _Oh, no_ , Jango realized with horror. _The Concordian Gazette. Smart move, man._ _Really smart._

“Uh, it’s Mando’a. Mandalore’s tongue, you know”, he lamely answered.

Rex frowned.

“You can read that?”

“I’ve… been… teaching myself. You know how they encourage us to learn other languages even if we have translators, to keep our minds sharp…”

“And you picked Mando’a?” Rex prudently asked with a neutral glance, as if he were trying not to hurt his feelings. Jango almost laughed.

“Well, I’m already fluent in Huttese, and it’s kind of our cultural heritage… you know, Fett being Mandalorian and all… so it felt worth a shot.”

“Oh, I see”, the clone nodded.

“It seems a bit like a waste of your time, though”, a voice softly said behind him.

He turned around to discover a clone leaning casually against the wall, his arms crossed. There was nothing remarkable about him – no tattoo, no scar, no fancy haircut – but his eyes burnt bright with something Jango couldn’t quite place.

“How so?” he asked while looking at the other straight in the eye.

The clone uncrossed his arms, smiled, and walked to him without breaking eye contact. The bounty hunter was starting to feel a little uneasy, but he would be damned if he averted his gaze first.

“Well”, the other said, “I strongly doubt Mando’a is talked by more than a couple million people in the galaxy, and given their recent… neutralization, one can safely say that they are pretty irrelevant in the grand scheme of war.”

His voice had a little tint of irony on the last words. Jango felt Rex move at his side, but he put his hand on his duplicate’s forearm. There was something about the newcomer that compelled him to listen.

“And of course”, the clone added in a quieter tone, “Fett’s origins have nothing to do with us.”

“Why not?” Jango frowned. “We are…”

“We are nothing.”

The voice was sharper now, and colder than the bounty hunter ever recalled hearing in the mouth of the clones. It sounded… exactly like he did when things went awry. It was unsettling.

“Slick”, Rex warned.

“It would be good for your soldiers to learn that lesson before the world teaches them the hard way, Captain”, the clone named Slick purred without stopping to look at Jango.

Rex opened his mouth, but the other was faster.

“Do what you want, but don’t get delusional, soldier”, he told the bounty hunter. “We are clones. We are the perfect, unlimited army. That’s all we are.”

“We are Mandalorians”, Jango snapped back. “It’s not just the genes. Our training, our armors, it’s all directly derived from Mandalorian culture.”

“Culture is for real people.”

Jango felt his heart skip a beat, and his jaw went slack. The clone slowly nodded, and walked away after executing a perfect salute for Rex.

It was only when Slick had disappeared that the bounty hunter recovered the use of his tongue.

“What the karking hell…?”

“Don’t pay attention to him”, Rex sighed while gently patting his arm. There was a mix of compassion and sadness in the captain’s eyes, and Jango felt a horrifying realization dawn over him.

“You agree with him.”

Rex looked away, and scratched the stubble on his head.

“He has a… disheartening take on things. But…”

“But you think he’s right”, Jango said more aggressively than he had meant to.

“ _I_ don’t”, Rex softly replied. “But the Kaminoans probably do, and it’s all that matters in the end.”

Jango felt guilt wash over him as he began to understand.

“So you can’t technically tell him anything. Even if you personally have a… different point of view.”

Rex stared at him intensely.

“Stay away from him, Dawn.”

“Yeah, sure”, Jango muttered.

“I mean it. Stick to your brothers. Hey, what’s the word for ‘brother’ in Mando’a?”

The clone’s voice had gone back to casually cheerful, as if the episode was closed and forgotten, but the bounty hunter didn’t buy it. Still, he forced himself to smile back and answered:

“It’s vod.”

“Alright then, vod. Can I ask you a favor? I kinda came for that in the first place.”

 _Punch Slick in the face for you?_ he almost replied, but he just nodded.

“Five more Jedi are coming tomorrow night and I have a ton of other meetings this afternoon, so I won’t have time to…”

“Background checks? Again? I thought you said it all went amazingly well.”

“Maybe it went so well because I came prepared?”

“Bullshit. You’re a natural for improvisation, Rex. But if it makes you feel better…”

“It will.”

“…and if you forget the tooka dance…”

“No chance.”

“Ugh. Fine. I’ll drop them for you tomorrow before dinner.”

“Thanks, Dawn”, said Rex as he got up.

He turned back on the doorway, and looked at him with sudden seriousness.

“About Slick…”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll stay away from him”, Jango lied.

“You’re lying.”

He blushed.

“Am not.”

“I’m serious. Don’t get into trouble.”

“When do I ever do?” indignantly asked the bounty hunter who had been dragged into an army of his own clones after accidentally leading a space siege, getting stabbed by a lightsaber in an animal-based execution arena, and misplacing his son in the process.

Rex gave him a thoughtful look before walking away.

\----

Electronic visualization was one of the most complex and expensive features to add to battle gear, and the most useful by far in Jango’s eyes – although Cad Bane called it “a crutch for untalented beginners” and Bossk “fancy useless shit”, he personally didn’t have a natural talent for circuits, nor infrared vision.

And relying on chance and appearances, when you weren’t an annoyingly brilliant Duros, could sometimes lead to mistaking the Wire-That-Cuts-The-Alarm with the Wire-That-Sets-Off-The-Cryo-Extinguisher, and consequently froze everyone half to death. (Zam had profusely apologized, but it had taken weeks before the others had talked to her again. Jango had pointed out that Bane’s carnation hadn’t changed much anyway, but somehow it had not helped.)

So there he was, trying to mount excruciatingly tiny circuits onto his already heavily modified blaster and to clear his mind from all the questions swirling inside. Working usually helped him to focus, but today it seemed like everything dragged him back to the same point.

It hurt to think about Zam. He had liked her, and taken her under his wing almost naturally when she had showed up on the bounty market. Smart girl, strong-headed, with a sharp tongue and a lot of potential… She had been close to Boba, too. He had never found the strength to tell the kid that she had been ready to betray them once the Jedi had caught her.

It had left him completely dumbfounded – if there was one thing you didn’t do in the job, that was it. You didn’t rat out the colleagues, ever. Not even the ones you didn’t like. If you were together on the job, you stood together. Shooting had been almost instinctive – he had only taken half a second to switch to the poison darts. These were a present from Dooku, coated in a painless venom which ensured a quick and peaceful death. The only gift he could grant the woman he had thought of as a friend.

Perhaps it had been a weakness; somehow, Kenobi had been led to Kamino after that, and he knew for a fact that the only thing he had left in his trail was the dart in Zam’s neck… He thought again of Dooku’s eyes, the dark, dark pits that never smiled with his mouth, and he wondered.

_How did the war start exactly?_

It was Gunray who had insisted he took Zam with him on the Amidala mission. Jango had supposed that the Nemoidian had a crush on his protégée and was trying to score points (a lot of men and women got very thoughtful when they met the shapeshifter), but maybe there had been more to it…

“Oh, Dawn, you have no idea what you just missed!”

“I probably do not. Enlighten me?” the bounty hunter answered without looking up.

Stealth crashed heavily on the seat next to him, along with three others.

“Master Kenobi was in the training area today-“

“-he is the _dopest_! The way he fights, you wouldn’t believe it!” Jesse yelled while throwing his arms in the air.

“ _I’m_ telling”, Stealth protested. “So, we were just practicing, and then he came in with two other Jedi…”

Jango felt a very fatherly smile come to his lips as the two clones related Kenobi’s prowess, interrupting each other every two sentences. He met Tup’s amused gaze, and they shared an affectionate eyeroll.

“And then he just somersaulted over me and he kicked me in the face!” Stealth concluded with a bright smile.

“And that was fun?” Jango prudently asked.

“It was awesome. And he apologized for ten minutes, it was cute.”

“Hoping you’ll get dispatched with Master Obi-Wan ?” Jesse snickered.

“Ooooh, General Kenobi”, another clone fawned with fluttering eyelashes, “please break my nasal septum! It’s not like Kix has got anything else to do!”

Stealth shrugged.

“Hey, that’s your job, Kix. You’re the one who picked first aid as your specialty.”

Kix stuck his tongue out.

“I thought you hoped you’d get Master Secura?” Tup intervened.

“Oh, yeah”, Stealth beamed. “That would be… Yeah.”

“Got a thing for Twi’leks, do you?” Jesse laughed.

“It is my medical duty to tell you that there’s a major allergy risk with Twi’lek fluids”, Kix reprovingly said. “It’s not like you got any chance, though.”

“And why not?” Stealth protested.

“She’s a Jedi”, Tup gently answered. “They’re not much into fluid stuff.”

Stealth shrugged with a pout while Jango snorted.

“It could still happen. I’m delightful.”

“Of course you are.”

The bounty hunter shook his head as the clones bickered around him. Once, he would have found it irritating and distracting, but right now, it somehow felt oddly comforting. It felt like… home.

“So, Dawn”, Tup interrupted. “ _What_ exactly are you doing to that rifle?”

“Why do you ask that like it’s something obscene?”

“Well, I know _people_ who probably find that very erotic”, Jesse pointed out with a smirk.

Stealth raised his arms.

“Oh, for the last time, Jesse…”

“I know, I know”, the clone nodded. “You got carried away with all that weapon maintenance and you accidentally polished the wrong barrel…”

 “Jesse, for fuck’s sake!”

“You know, you really shouldn’t use blaster oil for that”, Kix pointed out. “It’s very abrasive on mucous-“

“Nobody wants to hear you say that word, Kix.”

“I’m just being informative. Documentation is the basis of healthy attraction.”

“I am not attracted to guns!” Stealth yelled.

“Sounds an awful lot like what someone attracted to guns would say”, Tup sagely pointed out.

“So, when you said ‘Screw Shooting Practice’, earlier…”

“Oh, screw all of you. Especially Jesse. Do you hear me telling people about the Vacuum Incident?”

“I’m not sure the medic in me wants to hear that story”, Kix frowned.

“Nobody does”, Tup and Jango said in chorus.

“You people are nasty”, the clone added with a sigh. “So, Dawn…?”

“I’m setting up electronic visualization on the visor. It’s a… sort of filter to see the different components, you know? Helps locating the weakest spots on droids, stuff like that.”

“They have weak spots?” Jesse asked curiously.

Jango barely refrained from the urge to describe the 377 types of battle droids currently on the market and their respective features of interest and destruction points.

“I think so?” he shrugged instead. “The tiny clankers don’t like getting shot in the head junction, that’s for sure.  And the destroyer shields are elliptical, not circular, so there are two points – kinda like solar poles – where the force field is unstable, and with the energy backlash, you can… Why are you all looking at me like that?”

“I’m just impressed”, Jesse said. “I think Stealth might be horny.”

The other clone punched him in the arm.

“Shut up. Do you mind if I take notes?”

“So that’s what you’re doing with all your time in the library?” Tup asked with a reverent look.

“That’s really useful intel, you know”, Kix pointed out. “You should apply to be an instructor.”

The bounty hunter laughed.

“Oh, I don’t think I’d be much of a role model.”

“You would”, Stealth replied. “You always give good advice.”

 _Who let you tiny clueless teenagers fight in a war?_ Jango wondered. _How did I agree to that?_

_Oh, right. Boba. Boba is why I agreed to that._

_I can’t believe my biological clock sparked a galactic-sized conflict._

“Let him work, kids”, Tup paternally said. “He might save our asses again with all his tinkering.”

“We should have called you Tinker”, Stealth said. “Or Tinkerer.”

“Or Tinkerella”, Jesse whispered much to Jango’s surprise.

“How do you possibly know about that?” he enquired. “That cartoon is like… twenty years old, at least!”

It was one of Boba’s favorites when he was little, too. For months, the kid had insisted that later, he would be a fairy princess vigilante. Jango had never bothered discouraging him - he never did, and usually just waited for a fantasy to replace another. Along the years and the stories he stumbled upon, Boba had notably wanted to become a Jedi knight, a dancing star who was also a spy and also a villain but not a mean one, a renegade sea demigoddess, and a space pirate captain (which had made Hondo very happy). Kids were kids.

“Cartoon?” Jesse frowned. “I meant the holovid with the really hot…“

“Don’t say it”, Jango cut him with a sigh. “Is nothing sacred anymore?”

“Not with Jesse”, Stealth cheerfully said.

“You people are the worst”, the bounty hunter sighed. “I can’t believe we share the same genes.”

“Jango Fett must be rolling over in his grave”, Kix said.

Jango Fett considered the men around him, and shrugged.

“Who knows? Maybe he would have liked you crazy weirdos.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter will be there in the week-end, see you soon and thanks for reading ! :)


	6. The Duality of Felines

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Fuck, this one was HARD. So much dialogue. Exposition everywhere. Plot got knots. I hope it goes fluently, at this point I don’t even know anymore, it's been sitting on my desk for weeks. Also holy shit, we passed the 1.3 k hits!  
> I’m so happy so many of you are reading and liking this, aaaaah I don’t know it’s so unreal. I got so many nice comments? You people are the fricking best. Keep reviewing, it gives me life :D  
> I’m also rethinking my 1-fic-at-a-time policy, I got stuck on this chapter for a long time and I have TOO many ideas that want to be written and that keep distracting me (dark side leia, anyone?). Soooo I’m very probably gonna drown you in WIPS soon, woops.  
> For those of you who are curious about the Tooka song, I’m thinking something halfway between Witch Doctor and the Beach Boys (if anyone here wants to have a go at The Ultimate Shitty-Yet-Catchy Space Hit, have fun and let me hear it!)  
> Hope you’ll like this chapter!

The lunch bell was ringing in the refectory, covering the music on the speakers, and Jango was humming cheerfully. He had a plan, and planning made him happy. Rex’ background checks had paid off in an unexpected way; among the list of visiting Jedi, he had discovered the surprising record of Master Plo Koon, who had apparently specialized in collecting strays and younglings of all species across the galaxy.  

Jango wasn’t sure which story he liked better: the Case of the Fifty-Six War Orphans that the Kel Dor had brought to the Senate to testify of the consequences of Republican support to the local dictator (before hosting them for six months in the Jedi Temple and protesting almost daily under the Chancellor’s windows), or just the Baby Rancor Fostering Affair, which had apparently given Master Windu a minor heart attack. Jango liked him already. 

Having never met the Jedi before, he doubted that Plo Koon would notice his Force signature. And with a little luck, talking about the Lucky cadet and his worries about him within hearing distance of the fiercely protective Jedi Master might be enough for him to offer his help.  

Admittedly, it wasn’t the best plan he had ever come up with. It was merely a good plan. If he was completely honest, he had to recognize that it was an uncertain, lousy and overall just desperate plan. But it was a plan nonetheless, which was more than he had had in the past weeks, so Jango was happy.  

Stealth and Jesse had stayed behind in the training area to try and get a glimpse of Master Secura’s fighting demonstration; a lot of clones had done the same, so the line in the refectory was refreshingly scarce. As Jango had put it, it was the Horny versus the Hungry, and he had chosen his side.  

He sang along lightly as he sat at one of the free tables. 

 _“And I don’t know how I ever thought that I could make it all alone…”_  

 _“When you only make it better”,_ another clone started singing behind him, “ _and it better be tonight…”_  

Jango turned around and smiled broadly at the man, who was sporting a forehead tattoo which looked like a 5. The clone winked back, and lifted his arms in the air as he loudly chanted the refrain.  

The bounty hunter laughed, a warm feeling spreading in his guts. Hearing your own voice singing in canon was an experience of a kind, but it sounded nice. The Five guy was a little out of key, but his cheerfulness made up for it.  

“For Force’s sake, Fives”, another clone at his table groaned. “Enough with the musicals.” 

“You’re hopeless, Hevy. Ain’t nothing like the good oldies, right?” Fives said while friendly punching Jango in the shoulder.  

The bounty hunter almost choked on his Shoko-Shake.  

“It’s not old”, he protested. “It’s, what…?” 

“Ten years old”, Fives said with a meaningful nod. “They don’t make music like that anymore.” 

The clone called Hevy threw a piece of bread at Fives’ face. His neighbor protested weakly about refectory rules, but the massive soldier ignored him. 

“Holy kriff, you’re obnoxious.” 

“No, I just have taste, unlike you”, Fives said while throwing the piece of bread in the air and trying to catch it with his mouth. He failed. 

“Ten years is not that much”, Jango mumbled.  

He liked that song. It had been blasting on loop in Slave I during the Malachor Crown Heist – which, contrary to what its name entailed, was not the heist _of_ the crown, but _by_ the crown. Queen Raaya had a lot of time and money on her hands, peculiar hobbies, and she got easily bored. She had also proven to be a surprisingly competent theft partner. It was a good memory.  

It was also the first mission he had worked with Bane since he had adopted Boba – his colleague/lover/archnemesis had vanished for months when he had showed up on Nar Shadaa with the tiny wailing package cradled in his arms.  

He still hadn’t elucidated if the cold-blooded Duros was terrified of babies or if it had been some sort of awkward jealousy fit (which Jango would have found fairly undue given Bane’s own tendencies to sleep around, and with fairly eclectic tastes). They had had their worst fights ever on that mission, and some of their best sex too - which probably wasn’t completely unrelated. It also wasn’t completely unrelated that Queen Raaya was achingly good at reconciling people. All in all, it had been fun, and it seemed like yesterday. 

“Letting you into that Music History class was a mistake”, Hevy groaned. 

“History?” Jango repeated incredulously. 

“Not everyone enjoys that stupid loth cat song.” 

 _I’ll drink_ _to that_ , the bounty hunter thought. _But seriously, history? Th_ _e disrespect is real._  

 “Tooka. It’s a tooka.” 

“It could be a bloody varren, it wouldn’t be any less idiotic, vod.” 

Jango’s grumpy internal monologue about the nerve of young people stopped with a screech. 

“What did you call him?” 

“Vod?” Fives replied. “Oh, it means brother in Mandalorian. It’s the new thing, it’s getting really trendy.” 

“Among the cadets”, Hevy snorted. 

Jango felt his filial alert system jump into Sirens-And-Flashing-Lights-Mode without warning. 

“Oh yeah, I heard about that. Who does it come from?” he asked as casually as he could. 

“Who knows?” Fives shrugged thoughtfully. “It’s a trend; how it started isn’t what matters, it’s more about communication and sharing some…” 

This time, Hevy’s bread landed straight into the mouth of the clone, who choked on the rest of his sentence.  

Jango sighed as the big soldier’s roar of laughter drowned Fives’ outraged protestations. It seemed Boba was also having an impact among the cadets, though he doubted that lead would give anything. Fives was right; pinpointing the beginning of a trend was nearly impossible. 

Still, it felt right to hear his native tongue in the mouths of the clones.  

“You’re a bloody osiaim”, Fives gasped after chugging a full glass of water.  

Jango frowned. “An omelette?”  

“What?” 

“What, what?” 

Fives and Jango stared at each other during a few confused seconds.  

“It’s a Mandalorian insult”, Fives said.  

“You called me an omelette?” Hevy shouted. 

“No! I called you a useless piece of dung!” 

“Oh, that’s better”, Hevy instantly calmed down. “I hate eggs. How did you say that?” 

“Osiaim?” Fives repeated while glancing at Jango.  

The bounty hunter couldn’t help giggling. 

“That means omelette. Osi’yaim, maybe?” 

“That’s what I said.” 

“Not exactly”, the more discrete clone mumbled. 

“Wait. So you speak Mandalorian too?” Fives inquired. 

“I picked up a few words, yeah. It’s always interesting to learn a new language, especially when it’s relevant to our origins and our culture… ” 

“Do you know any more insults?” Hevy eagerly asked.  

Jango sighed internally.  

“I’d ask Fives”, the big clone added, “but it seems like a terrible idea.” 

“Shut up, osiaim.” 

“You said it wrong again.” 

“Or maybe I was calling you an omelette.” 

Jango sighed externally. 

The quiet clone met his gaze, and rolled his eyes as he continued eating.  

“Just go ahead”, he said while the other two bickered. “Verbal fights are slightly less frowned upon than physical ones, and you might as well save us all the trouble before they start stabbing each other with forks. Again.” 

“Right”, the bounty hunter slowly said. “Okay. There was, let me see… Hut’uun?” 

“Sounds good”, Hevy said. “What does it mean? And is there a risk of gastronomical double entendre?” 

“I… I don’t think so. And it means ‘coward’. It’s one of the worst insults in Mando’a, actually, because there is a strong culture of bravery ingrained in mentalities, and…” 

Jango stopped talking at Hevy’s skeptical pout.  

“Do you have anything a little spicier?” 

 _I keep forgetting about this, but some of you really are overgrown ten-year-old brats._ _I miss Boba._  

“Shabuir?” the bounty hunter proposed, defeated. “It just means ‘asshole’. Literally.” 

Hevy’s face lightened up. 

“Now that’s what I’m talking about.” 

The quiet clone lightly shook his head, and they exchanged a tired glance. 

 “Are we doing language lunch today?” a cheerful voice asked behind Jango. 

He broadly smiled as Tup sat next to him. 

“Yep. Theme of the day is Mando’a.” 

“Ooooh”, the clone grinned as he opened his ration bar. “A tribute to the Original? It’s been almost a month since he died, isn’t it?” 

“What, already? Huh. Uh, I guess so. I’m just trying to learn about our culture.” 

“Fair enough”, Tup nodded. “Why are we starting with insults?” 

“These guys asked me”, Jango shrugged. At the other table, the clones were starting to get up. 

“Come on Echo, hurry a bit.” 

“Not everyone eats a pound of food by the minute”, the quiet one replied.  

“See you around, music guy!” 

“Name’s Dawn”, Jango said. “Have a good day!” 

He silently mouthed a ‘Good luck’ for Echo, who rolled his eyes before following the rest of his squad out. 

“How was training?” Tup asked in between mouthfuls. 

“Fun”, Jango honestly answered. “The Jedi are doing their best to integrate themselves. Some of them are having… more success than others.” 

“Master Secura?” Tup said with a knowing smile. 

“She’s getting really popular”, Jango replied while the clone giggled. “How about you? Where were you?” 

“I had an insane headache this morning. Felt like something was trying to split my skull from the inside. I just came back from the medbay.” 

“Shit. Are you alright? What did they say?” 

“They don’t know yet. It was really bad – took me half an hour to get up and grab the com on my bedside. Kix was really pissed with the other guys from the dorm – he said they should have noticed I wasn’t well, or at least asked before they left for training.” 

“Yeah, they should have”, Jango angrily approved. “What kind of bullshit squad doesn’t notice one of their brothers has stayed behind?” 

“We’re not exactly a squad”, Tup shrugged. “Not everyone gets along with their recovery group as well as you do with Stealth and Jesse.” 

“You should join our dorm. If you think you can handle Jesse’s sleepwalking.” 

“Oh, that must be hilarious.” 

“Half of the time, it is. The other half, you wake up with his face two inches from your nose while he whispers something about bread, and it’s downright terrifying.” 

“Maybe I’ll ask Kix to fill a request to move me with you guys. We’d make a good squad, wouldn’t we?” 

“Damn right.” 

Stealth and Jesse showed up a few minutes later, elbowing their way through the crowd of clones who had finally gotten to the refectory. 

“Are those greenberries?” Stealth asked with a light in his eyes as he stared at Jango’s platter. 

“ _My_ greenberries”, Jango corrected while placing his fork in a defensive position.  

“They were out when we arrived”, the clone complained. 

“Then you should have arrived earlier”, Tup commented with a smile. “How was Master Secura?” 

“Worth it”, Jesse grinned. “The way she moves on her feet, and her jumps, and her _smile_... honestly, I don’t give a flying kriff about greenberries.” 

“I do”, Stealth muttered. He looked so miserable that Jango felt a surge of pity, and he handed a small bunch to the clone. 

“You’re weak, Dawn”, Tup snickered. 

“No, he’s kind, and the best”, Stealth firmly replied with a luminous smile. “And nobody resists my charms anyway.” 

“I think you’re confusing ‘charming’ with ‘pitiful’.” 

The clone stuck his tongue out at Jesse. 

“And where were you, Tup? You’re gonna get in trouble if you keep missing practice.” 

“Medbay.” 

“Making out with Kix again, or for an actual problem?” 

Jango started coughing as one of his berries went down the wrong way.  

 _Was that a joke? Of course it was_ _a joke._  

 _It didn’t sound like a joke._  

 “A very actual, very real, very bone-splitting headache”, Tup sighed. “And you know that time with Kix wasn’t what it looked like. I _had_ an actual problem.” 

“Tup, no matter what Kix says”, Jesse commented, “a boner is not a medical condition.” 

“Guys, I think we broke Dawn”, Stealth prudently said.  

The bounty hunter blinked a few times, trying to catch his breath. 

“What? No. I was… You and Kix? Really?” 

“Once”, Tup shrugged. “And it had to be the day when Jesse burst in on one leg because he shot himself in the foot.” 

“My rifle went wrong”, Jesse protested. “I’m sorry Dawn, I didn’t take you for the jealous type. Should have kept my mouth shut.” 

“If only you knew how to”, Stealth snickered. 

“... Jealous? Uh… no. No, that’s not… No. Really not.” 

The bounty hunter cleared his throat, and shook surprise off his head. He was a fervent partisan of letting people do whatever the hell they wanted, as long as they didn’t directly threaten him. Sure, it was deeply unsettling to imagine his clones in relationships of this kind, especially the ones he had come to think of as... kin. (He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to be an elder brother, a remote father or maybe the awkward survivalist uncle, but they sure as hell were family.) 

Still, it was none of his business. And if it meant they found happiness despite the lives that had been thrown upon them, it was all the better.  

 “I never realized that this was a… a thing that clones did.” 

The three clones looked at him with the same puzzled expression. 

 “You never…?” Stealth cautiously asked. 

Jango laughed nervously. 

 “No. Uh… I’m pretty sure I’m just into women.” 

On the list of blatant lies he had told in his life, this one had to be among the most outrageous. Bane would probably have broken a rib from laughing.  

But even if he could understand clones being drawn to each other, there was no way in hell he was going to flirt with men who literally could have been his son.  

“You know, that’s gonna be difficult”, Stealth diplomatically said. 

Jango bit his tongue to prevent himself from laughing, and he nodded with a sad face. 

Jesse looked disappointed.  

 “Aww”, he winced. “I really thought you and Tup had a thing going.” 

“You’re reading into things again, Jesse. I’m more the type that people admire from afar with dazed fascination”, Tup casually replied.  

Stealth and Jesse groaned, and Jango burst out laughing. 

“No, it’s better like this”, the clone added with a wink. “No risk of awkwardness when I move in with you guys.” 

“You’re joining us?” Stealth said with a bright smile. “Hey, with the four of us, that’s already half a squad!” 

“If you leave that hair of yours in the fresher”, Jesse warned, “I’m kicking you out.” 

“At least I don’t stalk my roomies while I sleep”, Tup retorted. 

“You told him?” Jesse outrageously asked. 

Jango shrugged. 

“I’d rather warn him now about your quirks than risk repeating the Headbutting Incident. You people are terrible for my sleep schedule.” 

“In my defense, it was scary as kriff”, Stealth mumbled. 

Jesse rubbed the brink of his nose. 

“Of all the dangers we face, you’d think I’d be safe from my own brothers.” 

“Danger always comes from where you least suspect”, Tup joked. 

Jango smiled, but he felt a strange tingle on the back of his neck. Looking up, he met the eyes of a clone who was crossing the refectory.  

Slick kept staring at him straight in the eye for a few seconds, in that disturbing way of his, and then he smiled.  

The bounty hunter felt his fist instinctively clench, and he forced himself to relax. The things the clone had said were still ringing in his ears, fresh like a new scar, but he couldn’t bring himself to hate him. Had anyone else dared saying this, he would have gone straight for the kill, but it wasn’t that simple. It wasn’t another smug senator explaining on holovision interviews that lab-born creatures couldn’t really be considered as people, and thus weren’t entitled to a voice.  

(It was probably a good thing for said senators that Jango was stuck on Kamino for now. Part of him couldn’t wait to be back to his old life, and to _heatedly_  remind them that corpses didn’t have a voice either.) 

This wasn’t the same. No matter how obnoxious Slick was, he was a clone.  

Jango wondered what the sergeant actually believed. Did he truly think of himself as a tool to be used, without any right or legitimacy to a culture? Or was it just a twisted way to make his brothers think about their condition?  

He felt something tapping insistently against his knee, and reported his look back to his friends. 

Jesse was very badly pretending to look at his plate while kicking him repeatedly. Tup and Stealth bore the same paralyzed smile, and kept glancing at him.  

Jango frowned.  

“Stop that, for Force’s sake”, Jesse muttered under his breath. 

“Why are you glaring at Sergeant Slick?” Stealth whispered in the high-pitched tone he used when he was stressed.  

The bounty hunter opened his mouth to answer, but a booming voice cut him. 

“Wrong question, trooper. Try this: for which of the dozen of possible reasons you could have are you currently glaring at Sergeant Asshole, Dawn?” 

Jango let a huge smile come over his face. 

“Hello, Captain.” 

Stealth saluted briskly. 

“Should you talk about your subordinates like that, Captain Wolffe?” Tup asked with a sly smile. 

Wolffe grinned widely as he sat on the table.  

“Oh, right. He’s my subordinate now.” 

There was an immeasurable pleasure in the clone’s voice, and for a moment his eyes burned with petty satisfaction. 

“Congratulations on the promotion, sir”, Jesse said. “You deserve it.” 

“I sure do”, Wolffe agreed. “About damn time they acknowledged it.” 

“So you’re gonna have a whole company now?” Stealth excitedly asked. “I know a lot of us are being redistributed, but is there a chance…?” 

“Haven’t had enough of me yet, kid?” Wolffe laughed. “I thought I was just… what was it? An ice-cold tireless sadist?” 

Stealth blushed furiously. 

“You know I never meant that, sir. What you did – what you do, all of it – it’s for your men’s good. And you’re an amazing fighter, and you’re so smart, and…” 

The captain was grinning like a loth cat while Stealth kept on blabbering awkwardly. 

“Keep flattering your superiors like that and you’re gonna go far, soldier.” 

“I thought you despised ass-licking, sir?” Jesse innocently asked. His smile turned into a wince when Stealth kicked him in the shin. 

Wolffe waved lazily. 

“Only the ass-licking that isn’t aimed at me. Let it be known that these buttocks have nothing against thorough humectation.” 

“Gross, sir”, Tup chortled. 

“Don’t judge it until you’ve tried it.” 

Jango laughed. 

“Doesn’t that count as sexual harassment, captain?” 

Wolffe gave him a scandalous wink.  

“You wish. So, Dawn, what’s going on with Slick?” 

“Nothing”, Jango shrugged. “We met yesterday, and I can’t figure out what his deal is.” 

“Nobody can”, the newly appointed captain snorted. “But he won’t be bossing me around anymore.” 

“That sounds like a dangerous thing to do anyway”, the bounty hunter commented. He wondered what kind of commanding officer Slick could be – from Wolffe’s reaction, he clearly wasn’t keeping his ‘disheartening’ opinions to personal bantering in libraries. 

“Did you get your Jedi affectation yet?” Stealth eagerly asked his former lieutenant. 

Wolffe nodded. 

“It’s still confidential, sorry. As for you guys, I can’t promise anything. We’re wrapping things up.” 

Jango felt a knot of anxiety form in his throat. He had perfectly recovered from his injury, and clones were sent on new missions everyday – it wouldn’t be long before his turn came. And finding Boba would be nearly impossible then.  

He had to find a solution, and quickly.  

“I actually have a question for you”, Wolffe said with a berry-throwing-and-mouth-catching move which would have made Fives reel with envy. “You’ve been working with Sergeant Boost, right? How is he?” 

“Good”, Tup said. “He explains well, and he doesn’t yell.” 

Jesse nodded. “Yeah, he’s an excellent instructor. We’re lucky to have him – I’d never have gotten that good without him. ” 

“He misses the field”, Jango said. 

Wolffe tilted his head, a light of interest in his eyes.  

“Did he tell you that?” Stealth asked, surprised. 

“No. It’s just…” 

Jango thought about it for a minute. Boost was an excellent teacher, patient and competent, but there was also a sadness in his eyes that the bounty hunter knew too well. The sergeant had a comfortable position, he was safe and respected, but the way he looked at squads when he thought nobody noticed was heart wrenching.  

It was the look of a man who knew that half of the boys he was teaching would never return.  

A man who wished he could be one of them instead of bearing that knowledge.  

Boost just wanted to run towards his own death among brothers, instead of standing by and witnessing them come and go as war took its toll. 

He wanted to fight, to live, to die. Anything but to keep carrying that burden. 

Jango didn’t feel like explaining it to the clones, though. 

“I don’t know. It’s just… the way he talks about squads, his lessons about covering your team… It just shows.” 

“Good to know”, the captain muttered. “Well. Sorry children, I have to go. Officer stuff and all that. Play nice, unless it’s with Sergeant Slick.” 

“Take care, sir”, Stealth said.  

“Don’t worry about me, kiddo.” 

Stealth gave him a face that said he absolutely did not plan to follow through with that instruction. 

\--- 

The afternoon went as it usually did lately: they headed for the gym, Jango went through his physical training routine as quickly as possible, then settled in a corner with his datapad to read the news.  

The galaxy had erupted into turmoil in a distressingly short time: battlefronts were multiplying, as more and more systems were leaving the Republic, which made the Senate take retaliating measures, which scared even more systems out of it. The cycle was endless, and it kept getting worse. 

It was like witnessing a bar fight where the lights would suddenly have gone out. Everyone was punching their neighbors in panic, most of the time without any other reason than the classical fallacy of “If I Don't Hit Them, They Will Hit Me First”. 

Civil tensions in multicultural worlds were turning into full-scale wars, just because the Republic suddenly picked a side to support, and the Seppies another. And just like that, internal governments who were once only mildly annoyed with one another suddenly were given the opportunity to try and blast the other parties from existence.  

Which of course they took, because they were governments. 

It left Jango with a nasty taste in his mouth. War was one thing. This manipulative puppetry was another.  

It didn’t help to know that Dooku was somehow behind it all. 

“Forty-five… Forty-six…” 

“You know it doesn’t count if you start at thirty, right?” 

“Forty-fuck-you… Forty-eight…” 

Jesse grinned, and came to the bench next to Jango’s. 

“You know, Dawn”, he said while stretching his shoulders, “I couldn’t help noticing something in the showers.” 

The bounty hunter blinked. 

“That’s really not a place where you should be noticing things”, he answered. 

Two nearby clones giggled, and Jango smiled at them – the Mustache guy was often hanging around in the gym, and his friend was never far. He couldn’t recall their names, but the pair was friendly and had helped him up to the traction bar a few times.  

Jesse snorted.  

“Dude, we literally have the same bodies. I don’t give a kriff about what your butt looks like. No, I was just wondering… How come you don’t have any ink?” 

“You don’t?” Mustache exclaimed. 

“I guess not”, Jango shrugged. Tattoos had never really been his thing – he couldn’t quite see the point of decorating his skin, though to be fair he didn’t really see the point of decoration at all. Most clones, on the other hand, bore marks of one kind or another - as a fierce and desperate attempt to claim their bodies as their own, he guessed.

“You’re not one of those mindless, protocol-obsessed blankies, are you?” the bald one asked with a disapproving frown. 

Jesse burst out laughing. 

“Protocol-obsessed? This guy?” 

“Protocol is important”, Jango defended – he had written it himself, after all. “You just have to know when to… adapt it.” 

“See? That’s what I’m talking about. So, I was thinking… Is there a reason you won’t have any?” 

“I don’t think so. I just never really found a relevant design.” 

Jesse had a light in his eyes, and he silently handed out his own datapad to Jango. 

“Damn, Jesse. I never took you for the artist.” 

The bounty hunter stared in awe at the drawing in front of him. In the past weeks, he had learnt to appreciate the clone – underneath his foul mouth and crass jokes, Jesse was a kind-hearted man, and one of the best snipers he had ever met. He hadn’t imagined that his precision would extend to the artistic domain. Clearly, he had been wrong.  

“It’s a sun”, the clone uselessly pointed out.  

“Yes, I can see that.” 

“Because your name is Dawn.” 

“Yes, I guessed that too.” 

“Do you like it?” 

Jesse’s tone was aiming for casual, but he didn’t manage to hide a hopefulness that projected Jango five years back.  

 _Kids and their drawings_ , he mused. _Shit, it’s cute. And – forgive me, Boba – this one is actually good, too._  

 _I’m getting soft._  

Jango raised his head and smiled.  

“Do you think you could do the ink yourself?”  

The look in Jesse’s eyes was so happy it hurt.  

\--- 

As far as he could remember, Jango had always had an excellent control of his own body. Even as a teenager, before war ripped him apart from his home and his family, he used to try and improve his faculties in any way he could – staying underwater until he saw stars, swimming just a little further than what was reasonable, or even balancing on one foot during long, boring ceremonies just for the heck of it.  

When he had donned his armor for the first time, he had made a point to turn childish stubbornness into determinate self-control.  

He liked to think that he had succeeded. He almost never panicked, he could keep a straight face even when negotiating with obnoxious Hutts, and his body barely ever expressed his feelings (which sometimes got embarrassing in intimate situations, but was overall vastly worth it).  

So why he kept on flinching under Jesse’s stylus was beyond him.  

“Dude”, the clone groaned. “Do I have to stun you?” 

“Sorry. It’s just-“ he cringed again, and Jesse clicked his tongue in disapproval, “- I’m not fond of needles.” 

“You’re such a baby.”  

 _I’m forty years older than you_ , the bounty hunter internally grumbled.  

“Looking good, man”, Mustache commented as he peeked at Jesse’s work.  

“Thanks”, Jango and the clone answered in chorus. 

“He meant me”, Jesse huffed. “You’re not exactly helpful.” 

“No, I’m pretty sure it was about my chest.” 

“I meant you, on him”, Mustache said before frowning. “Boy, that came out wrong.” 

“As always”, the Bald snickered.  

The two clones had stuck around when Jango and his recycled half-squad had headed towards the relaxing area, and he was silently trying his best to remember their names. He was about two hours past asking for a reminder without it being terribly awkward. 

“I’m starting the tricky part. For the love of everything holy, please be still.” 

“Nobody appreciates my efforts.” 

 “Trying doesn’t count when others depend on it.” 

“We’re getting very philosophical around Dawn’s nipples”, Stealth commented from his cushion.  

“They _are_ inspiring nipples”, Mustache approved.  

“I changed my mind. Please stun me.” 

“Aww, don’t be so – hey, Spectre! Look, I found you a proper inker.” 

The white-haired clone Mustache had greeted made his way to the group, and smiled. There was a litheness to him that made Jango feel inexplicably queasy. He silently scolded himself for his paranoia, but the feeling remained – something instinctive he couldn’t quite put his finger on.  

He forced himself to smile back at the newcomer, and that’s when it hit him. 

The man walked like a dancer, his feet light and precise, with a balance in his gait he had only ever seen in the most subtle of his colleagues. Between all the soldiers chilling in the room, loud and lenient, Spectre stuck out like a sore thumb. 

This clone moved like an assassin. 

Jango felt the hairs on his forearms rise in a shiver. Seemingly oblivious to his uneasiness, Spectre leaned over him to look at Jesse’s work. 

“Not too bad”, he granted in a soft voice. “The pattern is nice, even if you could work on your precision. I’m not sure those wavy lines really work.” 

Jesse stared blankly at the newcomer for a second. 

“Oh, you’re quite the artist, then?” he dangerously asked.  

“Not myself, but I have a keen eye for this sort of things. Don’t beat yourself too hard. It’s the vagaries of clone engineering, after all. Not everyone gets to be the… accurate type.” 

“I beg your fucking pardon?” Jesse softly said, stylus hovering over Jango’s skin. 

“Dude, don’t start”, Mustache muttered. “Sorry about that. Spectre is a bit… manic sometimes.” 

“I just see things differently.” 

Spectre’s voice was calm and composed, but his eyes lit up for a second, as if this thought was highly amusing. Jesse’s look had turned fully murderous, and he balled his fist around the needle. 

 _I don’t have a good feeling about this._  

Before Jesse could get a chance to show Spectre how painfully accurate he could be, the bounty hunter loudly cleared his throat and started blabbering. Somehow, it didn’t feel like a good idea to let Jesse antagonize the white-haired guy. 

“Oh no, he’s accurate. Best on Kamino. Full ten on every scope. It’s my fault, actually. I keep moving. It tickles. Don’t like needles. Aha. Nice hair. So you’re all in the same squad? I haven’t seen you around before.” 

 _Hell, this is embarrassing._  

“We are”, Spectre said. “Well, it’s just the four of us left, actually. Boil, Waxer…” 

That’s _their names!_ Jango internally exulted. _How could I_ _forget? I have no idea how a guy gets called ‘Waxer’, but that has to be a story worth hearing._  

“… Carrots and me”, Spectre concluded, and the bounty hunter physically felt his ears rise up.  

“Oh, I know that guy too”, Jango casually said. “I had no idea he was in your squad.” 

 “To be fair, I’m not sure he’ll still be with us for long”, the clone replied. 

His eyes briefly lit up again with that secret delight, and Jango felt his heart skip a beat. The look on Carrot’s face on the Stargazer flashed through his mind like a lightning bolt, and he slowly rose up, stilling Jesse’s hand. 

He looked at Spectre with all pretense of peacefulness abandoned, and asked in an icily calm voice: 

“What exactly do you mean?”  

The clone looked back at him with surprise, but Jango could have sworn that for a split second, a glimpse of suspicion shone in the man’s eyes. 

“I was just joking. He keeps on attracting… difficulties. Someday, he will run out of luck.” 

“Why are you saying that? What happened?” Boil enquired in a worried voice. 

“You didn’t hear?” Spectre said after glancing at Jango again. “He almost fell into the sea.” 

“What?” 

“Apparently, he slipped on the walkway back from training. He managed to grab the scaffold about halfway through his fall, but he was stuck down there. He just got pulled back by the evening patrol.” 

“He spent all day on a fucking scaffold above the sea?” Waxer exclaimed, jumping to his feet.  

“Is he alright?”  

Spectre shrugged.  

“He’s in the medbay. A little shaken. A few broken ribs. Nothing compared to what could have happened.” 

“I heard you can actually survive the fall if you do it right”, Tup mused out loud. “There’s something about the angle of the body when you hit the water.” 

“Right”, Jesse darkly said. “And then the currents pull you down and you can drown instead. Joy.” 

“I thought he was part of your squad”, Stealth reprovingly said. “How did none of you notice he was gone?” 

Boil and Waxer looked at each other with embarrassment. 

“Well…” 

“He’s fairly solitary”, Spectre quietly answered. “He doesn’t talk much with other people. Not that I blame him - neither do I, honestly.” 

“Can’t imagine why”, Jesse muttered. 

“We should go and see him”, Boil said. “See you later, guys.” 

Spectre nodded, and gave Jango an inscrutable look. Very softly, the bounty hunter smiled.  

“Give him my regards.” 

 Jesse kept pouting until the trio disappeared. 

“Well, I don’t like this dude”, he huffed. 

“Me neith-OW! Easy on the needle, please?” 

“Sorry. He pissed me off. I’m accurate, right?” 

“Yes, Jesse. You’re perfect. That little fucker and his keen eyes are full of crap. Trust me, I should know.” 

“Why?” 

Jango smiled. 

“Because I’m the most accurate replica there has ever been to the Original.” 

“Right”, Tup snorted.  

“Eh, it could be”, Jesse mused with a thoughtful look. “You do share his love of flaming shit up.” 

“Is it really true?” Stealth asked in awe. 

“Yeah. But it’s a secret.” 

“Of course it is. Well, you might be the closest, but I'm still the prettiest.” 

“So”, Jesse asked with a renewed grin, “you’re saying you’re prettier than the Original? That's borderline blasphemy. You can get up, Dawn, I’m out of ink.” 

“I'm just saying Jango Fett didn’t know what he got.” 

“You know, that’s probably true”, Jango softly said.

_You never really know what you have. You get used to everything. Until it's taken from you and you realize how blind you were to take anything for granted..._

His datapad blinked with a new message, distracting him from his thoughts, and he smiled despite himself. 

 _“He_ _yy_ _y_ _vodd_ _y, did y_ _u_ _get a chance to do the Thing I asked you? Rexxx”_  

 _“Yes”,_ he typed back. _“Just tell me when I can come by.”_  

 _“Now? im in the off lounge. pop by,_ _we got b0_ _0ze”_  

 _Teenagers and their_ _cryptic_ _spelling and hidden bottles,_ Jango thought. _Alcohol does sound nice, though._  

It took him a while to get to the Officers Lounge, which towered at the top of the western building. The view from the platform was impressive, and he gazed at the sea while he waited for Rex. The ocean was the main reason he had agreed to live on Kamino – he wanted Boba to also grow with the song of the waves, the smell of water storms and the unending horizon in his sight. 

“Hey, Dawn! Come in!” 

“Are you sure? I’m not an officer.” 

“Come in, soldier, that’s an order?” 

“That’s better, captain.” 

Rex grinned widely as Jango entered the Lounge – which was, this time, worthy of the name. Well, at least it had comfy-looking sofas and a holovision deck. _My standards have fallen._  

He handed the background checks to Rex on his datapad, and looked around. A dozen of clone officers were chilling in the room, most of whom he didn’t know. To his surprise, there was also a graceful Twi’lek with bright blue skin sprawling casually on one of the couches.  

Aayla Secura, he recognized, and his inner database instantly provided him with a full report. Rylothian. Came to the Order late, but one of their best Knights. Led the rebellion on Quell and took down at least three cartels in the Outer Rim. Good fighter. Very powerful.  

Dangerous.  

The Jedi looked at him, and gave him the kindest smile he had ever seen. 

“This is General Secura”, Rex uselessly introduced. “General, this is Dawn.” 

“It’s good to meet you”, Aayla said with a genuineness that went right through Jango’s heart. “Rex has told me a lot about, quote-unquote, the freakishly cool flamethrower guy.” 

She winked, and the bounty hunter couldn’t help smiling back. 

“Guilty. I like these things.” 

“I can’t blame you. They do look good.” 

There was a playfulness to her that Jango intuitively liked. It was confusing, though. Most of the Jedi he had come across had been indifferent snobs, radiating with the confident righteousness of their spirituality.  

As far as he had known, Jedi didn’t do flirty grins.

They also didn’t look at you like you were the most interesting person they had ever met.  

"I know, right?" he answered with a flattered smile. "I must admit, I'm surprised you think that. I was fairly distraught when I learnt the Jedi didn't approve of my style."

"Your style is fine, soldier", she replied with an impish look that made the bounty hunter chuckle. "Don't question yourself over the decisions of the Council -  they're still coming to terms with a lot of things right now. Perhaps they'll reconsider your flamethrowers later. "

"That would be nice. Your lightsabers are pretty hot too, after all."

"I know, right?" Aayla smirked with a raised eyebrow.

Jango mentally apologized to all the clones he had teased for their infatuation. Besides her agile silhouette and beautiful face, Aayla Secura beamed with a charisma that even he found enticing. 

He could understand that the clones, who had been taught all their lives that they didn’t matter as individuals, would get seriously flustered at General Secura looking right through their soul with those beautiful dark eyes of her. 

She wasn’t mocking, either. There was nothing cruel, no hint of derision, in her coy smiles and teasing tone. Jango knew about the Jedi vows, and all the clones also did; none of them actually deluded themselves in imagining this sort of things with the Twi’lek. She knew that too, and so there wasn’t a trace of awkwardness in her frisky demeanor. 

Jango liked that.  

He also liked that she had kept wearing traditional Rylothian attire – the lekku bands and waistless leather top – instead of the trademark Jedi robes. This wasn’t a woman who had renounced her cultural heritage in favor of the Order.  

He met Rex' eyes, and bit his tongue to stop himself from laughing at the clone's half-terrified, half-amazed look.

Of course, the overgrown teenagers, flowing with hormones and meeting women for the first time, would be gaping at his easiness around members of the female persuasion. 

_Still got it. Civilian Interaction Training can bite me._

A clone in blue commander armor cleared his throat, and held a cup to the Jedi.

"Here's your caf, ma'am", he blurted out.

"Thank you Bly, it's perfect." Aayla gently squeezed his forearm, and Bly stiffly nodded. 

"And there's hot shoko for the little lady, too", he nervously added while putting another glass on the low table. 

_The little lady?_

"Oh, that's adorable. Rali, what do we say?"

"Thank you", a voice piped from the cushioned depths, and Jango suddenly found himself looking back at two huge eyes peeking from behind the couch.

To his utter surprise, a little Devaronian girl came trotting around the furniture, grabbed her cup, and promptly hid again. 

"Come on love, don't play shy", Aayla said. 

The kid grudgingly came out while Rex stifled a laugh. She couldn't be much older than Boba; on her red-skinned forehead, two tiny horns were starting to poke out. She clung tightly to General Secura, silently staring at the clones while the Jedi stroked her head affectionately. 

"Sit down, boys", the Twi'lek offered as she let Rali settle against her on the couch. "I promise you, we don't bite."

She grinned at Bly while she said that, and the clone blushed furiously. 

"Or do we?" she added with a conniving smile for the kid. 

The Devaronian giggled, and buried her face in Aayla's side. 

"It was just one time, Master."

"This is a fierce one", the Jedi told the clones. She wrapped her arm around the girl's shoulders, softly grazing the budding horns with her thumb. "It won't be long before I'm the one learning from her."

"Oh, no", Rali muttered with her eyes closed. 

"With a mentor like you, I'm sure she'll be great", Rex said. 

"You're too kind, Captain. Coming from a leader such as you, that means a lot", Aayla genuinely replied.

Rex instantly joined Bly into the Land of Redfacedness and Awkward Wriggling.

Jango smiled despite himself, a soft and painful feeling waving over his chest. The tenderness beaming between the Jedi and her Padawan, the bright and simple love that clearly united the duo, made his throat clamp shut.

He missed his son. 

He had dived into his covert life with the professionalism and dedication he always showed, but it was getting hard to handle. Knowing that his child was somewhere in the city - so close, and yet out of reach and all by himself - was unbearable. His rational and composed mind was overwhelmed with a range of emotions he wasn't sure he could manage.

The constant (albeit shrinking) stress of being uncovered. The fleeting unease of guilt, and the knowledge that he had somehow screwed up the galaxy very badly, though he still wasn't sure how. The fierce protectiveness he instinctively felt for Jesse and Tup and Stealth and all the others, even Slick - and the misery of knowing that they were all slated for death. 

And along all that, the painful longing to get his family back.

He blinked rapidly to keep his eyes dry, and tried to focus on the conversation. The little girl was staring at him intently, her big eyes full of something that looked like compassion. Jango wondered if she had felt his thoughts, and how she had interpreted them - clones weren't given a family, but Jedi were ripped from theirs. Somehow, he was certain that the Devaronian child understood.

"-and that's how we got the base back, I guess", Bly finished while fidgeting with his wrist plates. 

"That's very impressive", Aayla complimented. "It's good to hear stories where the courage of their commander allows every man to get back home."

The bounty hunter had been pretty certain that Bly had reached the reddest point human complexion could attain. He had been wrong.

Still half-hiding under the Jedi's arm, Rali glanced at him, and they shared a knowing smile. Shy kids were often the most observant, and it looked like this one was no exception. 

"Well, you know..." the clone muttered, but a door hiss and a very loud groan interrupted him as a yellow-armored clone entered the Lounge.

"Rex, you have no idea the day I just - oh, hello General. I didn't expect to see you there."

Jango was impressed. The clone had snapped from tired comradery to stiff professionalism in a heartbeat. Unlike most of his officer colleagues, he also didn't look flustered one bit by the graceful Jedi - his face and tone were all polite indifference, and his stance so perfect it would have made Taun-We cry with joy. 

"Commander Cody", Aayla replied while straightening on the couch, as if the clone's authority was rubbing off on her. "My apologies, I didn't mean to intrude in your space. I was just visiting."

"You're not intruding, General", Cody replied, but his voice was still apathetically formal. "We are all officers here."

The bounty hunter cleared his throat and wriggled on his seat. Cody's eyes fell on him, and he felt the clone assess him with an acute look. There was a brightness in the commander's eyes that spoke of quick wits and dangerous subtlety. 

Jango felt bizarrely proud.

"This is Dawn", Rex interjected. "The one that, uh... You know. I told you."

Cody slowly nodded, his eyes still locked on Jango, scanning him with an intensity that was driving him nervous. _What did Rex tell you exactly?_

"Ah, yes. Well, I suppose you might as well stick around", the commander shrugged before turning to the drinks fridge.

_What is that supposed to mean?_

Rali had hidden even further into her master's lap, and she shot him an anxious look. Jango winked with a confidence he was far from feeling. In the three weeks he had spent among his duplicates, he had come to like some, to despise others, but this was the first time he felt intimidated by a clone. 

 _Just an overgrown teenager_ , he tried to remind himself, but somehow it didn't help in Cody's case. He was suddenly realizing what kind of men his carefully planned training program had been meant to create. 

A perfect soldier. The idea was terrifying.

It slightly helped that Cody seemed to be maintaining a facade that dropped around Rex. He had looked up from the fridge with incomprehension, and frowned at the captain. Rex had wiggled his eyebrows in a complex display, and pointed to the window with his chin. 

Apparently, this had all been very clear for Cody, who sighed deeply and sat next to Jango. 

_What was that about? And when did someone put a telepathic chip in the brain of those two?_

"How are you finding Kamino so far, master Secura?" Cody amiably asked.

"Good", Aayla replied while scratching her lekku. "It's... Well, it's impressive."

She opened her mouth to add something, but closed it back without a word. She suddenly seemed as nervous as Bly had been a moment earlier, and a moment of silence stretched between them.

"Heh", Rex suddenly chuckled. "Are you curious about our buckets, young lady?" 

Her left horn dangerously close to poking Aayla's breast, Rali nodded with an embarrassed noise.

"I like your tooka ears", she said timidly.

The silence returned, and then a coughing fit that could have been hiding laughter shook Cody's shoulders.

"My what?" Rex asked in complete confusion.

The kid pointed at the captain's helmet, and Rex followed her gaze.

"Or are they horns? Like mine?"

"... Horns? Where do you see horns? They're jaig eyes."

The kid looked puzzled, and wriggled on her seat with a contrite face.

"Aren't your eyes the black thing?" she finally asked, and Cody's cough returned.

"I... Well, yes. My eyes are under there. But these are not horns. Or tooka ears."

Rex looked slightly vexed, and Rali lowered her eyes. Devaronian didn't blush, but Jango could feel the tiny Padawan was mortified. 

"What is a jaig, exactly?" Aayla asked in a cheerful tone, as if she was trying to defuse the situation.

"An animal, I think", Bly immediately answered. "The eyes are an old symbol - you get to wear them when you've showed real bravery on the field. I think for Rex, it was Alacra...?"

"Yes", Cody replied. "The most daring charge I've ever witnessed. And cunning, as well. Mindless suicide isn't heroism."

Seemingly deaf to his brothers' praise, Rex was squinting at the ambiguous piece of armor.

"Cody, do you see a tooka?" 

The commander scratched his neck. 

"I... Well, I _know_ they're jaig eyes."

"Yeah, we all do", Bly immediately added. 

The captain made an outraged noise. 

"Oh, come on. Dawn, back me up there."

Jango ignored the look of warning that Cody shot him.

"They're very vertical jaig eyes, sir."

Rali had buried her face back in Aayla's lap, who patted her head reassuringly. 

"I've never seen that symbol before", the Jedi admitted. "Where does it come from?"

"It's Mandalorian", Jango answered, and Rex looked back at him in surprise. "They're based off the legend of the Seven-eyed mountain - it's your typical myth where a warrior wannabe proves his worth by stealing a jaig's feather. It's been a tradition among Mandalorians ever since."

"Sounds uselessly risky", Cody commented.

The Mandalorian couldn't help agreeing.

"I can't unsee it", Rex suddenly said. "Tooka ears. For Force's sake."

"If it's any consolation", Jango said, "it still fits the narrative."

Cody glared silently, and Rex looked at him with pained eyes. 

"If this is about the song, Dawn..."

"What song?" Aayla curiously asked. 

Rex didn't add a word, but his cheeks flushed red. 

"No, I mean it", the bounty hunter insisted. "Have you ever seen a live tooka?"

"Yes?" the clone frowned.

"I mean a wild one. Not the declawed, miserable inbred runts that senators like to parade on a golden leash."

"I didn't even know tookas were wild to start with", Rex admitted. 

"All animals are wild to start with."

"That is very true", the Twi'lek said with a smile. 

Rex typed something on his datapad, and huffed.  

"They look just the same to me."

"Oh, yes", Jango quietly said. "They _look_ friendly and strokable. That's why they were domesticated in the first place, after all. They also have the second sharpest teeth in the known animal kingdom, right behind Rancors. And they leap twenty times their size, and their claws hold one of the deadliest venoms you can find. Trust me, their cuteness is a lie."

 _Boba almost died from petting one of those fluffy little shits,_ the bounty hunter recalled.

"So... Cute and friend-shaped on the outside, but actually lethal and dangerous to handle? Interesting."

Cody's face was completely neutral, and his eyes were very strongly not focusing on Rex. The clone captain didn't look fooled one bit. 

The dinner bell went off soon after, and the officers scattered as everyone headed for their refectories. The Jedi and her Padawan glanced one last time at Jango before following Bly, and the bounty hunter made his way out. 

The sea was rougher now. Waves were hitting the pillars strongly, and a heavy smell of salt and rain lingered in the air. Above his head, dark clouds were gathering, swirling thickly in the strong wind. Jango thought of Carrots, of the terror that the clone must have felt, of the long hours he had spent above that formidable force of death. The faces of Spectre and Slick were dancing in his mind.

A storm was coming over them.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *lies face first on the floor* IT IS DONE.  
> Shit is gonna start hitting the fan in the next chapter with a long-due conversation between Jango and Carrots, Slick being Slick, and Jedi making decisions, but first i need a breather.  
> I'm gonna try and post something every friday from now on, which means much shorter chapters and more wips i guess, but at least it should progress more evenly. Please feel free to kick my ass in reviews if I take any delay.


	7. The Diversity of Sight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wow, it’s been a while!  
> (As promised, I squeezed in some fic stuff in my writing sessions :D)  
> Trying for something a little different today with a few new points of view, just to mix it up a bit! Please let me know what you think, comments give me life and very literally fuel me to keep it up.

Drift was staring angrily at the ceiling, his juvenile face crunched in a pout that hadn’t left him for the past four hours.

Life was unfair.

Everything was Ruly’s fault.

And, he internally added with the nastiest insult he knew, the Kaminoans were butts.

Yes, he had talked back to Sergeant Boost, and laughed when Ruly had fallen from the ladder during training, and maybe covering his pillow in glue had resulted in an unplanned trip to the medbay for the insufferable, protocol-obsessed cadet.

But come on, it was _funny._

And it was Ruly’s fault for standing in his way in the first place, and stopping him from going to the kitchen at night, when he had perfectly known that Drift _wanted to._

For Drift, that was reason enough for retaliation. He didn’t really care about all the stuff instructors were spewing around about war and fighting and whatever, as long as he could do what he wanted, when he wanted. He was fine with vaguely pretending to listen in class while looking at the sea outside, but did Ruly really have to elbow him every five minutes with the pretense that it was important?

So all in all, nothing was his fault. Yet here he was, unduly imprisoned in the Detention Center for the rest of the week.

Unfair.

The door hissed open, and before Drift got a chance to yell something at his gaolers (he was thinking something along the lines of ‘big butt’, or maybe ‘butt-head’, which was a favorite of his), a new cadet was pushed into the bright white cell, and it was closed again.

Drift looked at the newcomer without hiding his annoyance.

Pouting wasn’t the same when you weren’t alone to brood in your bed. Maybe he would have to resort to passing his nerves on the shy-looking guy.

On the other hand, he had been on his own for three days now. And although he would rather eat glass than admit it, he was starting to feel lonely.

He sighed deeply.

“Hi.”

“Hi”, the other cadet said while shuffling his feet. “So… you’re in detention too?”

“No”, Drift drawled, “I’m just here because I like the place. Of course I’m in detention, you butt.”

“Hey!” the guy snapped. “I’m not a butt. I was just trying to be friendly.”

“Whatever”, Drift yawned.

There was a moment of silence as the new guy climbed in the opposite bed, looking every shade of awkward.

The only thing that annoyed Drift more than Ruly was silence. (And math. And having to listen to the instructors for more than ten seconds. And cabbage, though he couldn’t quite explain his reasons for that last one.)

“So”, he spoke loudly, startling the other. “What are you there for?”

The clone glanced at him with what looked to be gratitude. Maybe he hated silence too. That was fine for Drift.

“I, uh… The Kaminoans said I took a premature initiative.”

‘Sounds boring’, Drift almost answered, but even he didn’t miss the embarrassment on the newcomer’s face. Whatever ‘premature’ was supposed to mean, it looked like there was a story behind it.

“Come on, you can tell me”, he said instead with the face he was certain spoke of innocence and trustworthiness.

Surprisingly, the boy didn’t look convinced.

He fidgeted with the sheets for a few seconds, as if he was preparing what to say. Drift always admired the people who managed that. His own tongue tended to run far faster than his brain, as Sergeant Boost put it.

“Okay. So. You know those dropships that were sent to Geonosis yesterday?”

“No. I’ve been here for three days. Something interesting happened?” Drift asked, feeling the excitement nipped in the bud. The military maneuvers of the Kaminoans bored him to no end, unless the explanation included the visual simulations that actually made him understand what the heck they were talking about. Still, it was always something to talk about.

The guy stared at him with wide eyes.

“I… Yes. Something interesting happened.”

“What?” Drift enquired, slightly more interested given his neighbor’s tone.

“The war started.”

Silence fell again.

“… And ?” Drift politely asked.

“What do you mean, and?”

“You said something interesting happened.”

“… Well, I would have thought that the beginning of an open war between the Republic and the Separatists was interesting?”

“You think so?” Drift asked with open disappointment. Surely it wasn’t unreasonable of him to expect a kid sent to the Detention Center, like him, to be a little more, well… like him?

The other guy coughed.

“Uh. Yes. Given that, you know, you… I mean we, are going to have to fight in it.”

“Oh. Maneuvers”, Drift knowingly said while crashing back on his bed.

“… Yeah. Anyway, I snuck on one of the dropships, and I landed there, and I helped for a bit but then I was caught and-”

“You what now?” Drift’s eyes snapped back open, and he rose in his bed.

“I snuck on one of the dropships?”, the other slowly repeated with an anxious look.

The dreadful silence returned, as Drift waited for the Suddenly-Much-Cooler cadet to continue, and the cadet stared back at him awkwardly.

“Well go on!”

“I thought you didn’t find that interesting”, the boy pointed out.

Drift didn’t like being pointed out at, especially when the Pointed-Out-Thing was that he had been wrong, so he snorted haughtily.

“If you had started with the interesting bit, I would have. It’s your fault. So, you left Kamino?”

“Yes?”

“How?” Drift enquired with a fire in his voice that seemed to surprise his neighbor.

“I… I learnt about the maneuver, and I went to see the shuttles in the landing bay”, the boy told with growing confidence, “and I spotted an unattended ship… so I just jumped in and I hid in the vents.”

“The vents?” Drift repeated admiratively. “Wasn’t it super tight?”

“It was”, the kid nodded.

“You’re lucky you didn’t get stuck”, Drift commented.

The kid laughed nervously.

“Aha. Right.”

“That would have been so dumb”, Drift added with a burst of laughter.

“Yeah, okay.”

“I mean, super dumb. Can you imagine”, he pictured in between giggles, “if you slipped in there, and when you try to get out, bam! Gotta call for help.”

“Yep, I get it.” The kid was smiling too, although it looked slightly forced.

“Seriously, stupidest thing in the history of stupid-”

“ALRIGHT NOW. So, like I was saying…”

Drift listened with unfiltered awe as the cadet recounted his adventure; how he had waited for the ship to take off, heard the gunfire and shouting over Kamino, how the dropship had approached, and how…

“It CRASHED?” Drift yelled, clenching his cover to his chest.

The other guy seemed much more at ease with telling his story now; he nodded with a little smile and continued.

“It was so sudden, I didn’t really understand what was going on at first…”

“Happens to me all the time”, Drift muttered.

“And then there was this huge noise, like metal on metal, and I saw the vents fold in front of me….”

“Oh, no”, he whispered in anxiety, completely oblivious for a moment to the fact that the boy had obviously survived.

“I was okay, though”, the guy quickly reassured him with the nicest smile Drift had ever been given.

“Of course you were”, he jokingly said as if his heart wasn’t beating hard in his chest. “Didn’t think you weren’t.”

“Well, it’s cool of you to worry over me”, the other said, and before Drift got a chance to protest that he didn’t worry over anyone or anything, he started talking again.

It took him about ten minutes to go over the full story, but the kid was so good at speaking that Drift felt as if he too had spent two hours on the sandy planet, with the gunfire roaring all around and the adrenaline rushing through his veins as he saved his much older brothers…

The silence didn’t feel so awkward when the cadet finished talking and the reality of the Detention Center slowly returned. Drift was still half-away, his imagination painting vivid scenes on the bleak ceiling.

“That”, he softly said once he had calmed down, “has got to be the coolest story anyone has ever lived.”

The other guy laughed heartily.

“I mean it”, Drift protested. “Hey, you didn’t tell me… Why did you go on that ship in the first place?”

He had meant it as ‘this one ship, as opposed to the hundreds of others that leave Kamino daily’, but apparently the cadet didn’t understand the subtext.

“I wanted to help”, he casually replied. “Thought I was ready to give my share, and it was an important mission for the GAR…”

“Oh.”

His voice died when he saw Drift’s expression.

“What?”

“I didn’t think you were… one of those”, Drift answered with a crushing disappointment. The Cool Cadet wasn’t an adventurous rebel after all. Just another eager-to-serve, mission-obsessed future perfect soldier.

 _‘You have to give your share’_ was Ruly’s favorite expression.

“I… uh.”

The boy said nothing for a moment, looking at him intently, as if he was trying to read his mind.

Drift wriggled awkwardly. Usually, people giving him attention meant he was about to get his butt handed out to him.

“I lied”, the guy suddenly said without stopping to look at him.

“What?” Drift squealed. “That dropship story…?”

“Oh, no”, he softly said. “No, that’s true. I lied about the reason why I did it.”

Drift’s ears turned to the cadet of their own volition, a renewed hope flaming in his chest.

“So…”

“So I’m not talking about it in the Detention Center, where we are watched and recorded and listened to in permanence.”

“Right”, Drift said. “We can talk about it later.”

He drummed absently on the bed frame, slightly moving around, until he…

Found it.

He kept his fingers focused on the frame junction, tapping with a regular beat which he had noticed made the wire that passed in the ceiling right above him vibrate obnoxiously.

“There”, he said. “It’s later now.”

“Huh?” the other kid said. He took notice of his hand motions, and his eyes jumped to the ceiling too.

“Huh”, he said, in a much more appreciative tone. “How did you figure that out?”

“Was bored”, Drift absently said. “So. Why did you go to Geonosis?”

“That’s a seriously neat trick”, the boy insisted. “You’ve got to have exactly the right frequency to jam the electrotransmission.”

“I know. So, why…”

“And how did you know you could use vibrations to fuck with it in the first place? Were you taught in electrohacking or something?”

“I guessed”, Drift cut him. “Same as you, obviously.”

“… Right. I guessed too. Not like I had any kind of formation in that.”

“So, why did you get on that ship?” Drift asked with a patience that was entirely uncommon to him.

“It was the first one to leave”, the boy said without stopping to look at his drumming.

“And you had to leave quick?”

The boy looked back up to him, taking his time to answer. His eyes were piercing, not unlike those of Sergeant Boost, but they were lacking the judgement and disappointment.

“Can I tell you a big secret?” the boy whispered as he crossed his hands behind his head.

Drift snorted.

“Why do you think I’m getting finger-cramps for, you butt?”

“Butt yourself.”

“Butt yourself, yourself.”

The boy smiled.

“It’s really big”, he added with a conspiratory look that made Drift boil with curiosity. “And I will need help with it. And you can’t tell anyone.”

“I swear.”

“Alright. I have… problems with my batch. Big ones. I had to leave.”

Drift pondered about it for a while. Clones didn’t have a family, the Kaminoan instructors kept repeating it; but from what he had gathered, the batch was supposed to be what they had instead. Your batch was your future squad – your first one, they said, although why someone would need to change squads didn’t make sense at all to Drift – if you had seven people you trusted around you, surely you stayed with them until… until forever?

The batch was supposed to stand strong, and united, every clone bringing his own strengths to reinforce his brothers.

Giving his share.

Drift didn’t feel like he had a share to give, although he had never dared to tell the instructors. He knew what happened to the useless ones – the stories were hushed, and told only behind closed doors, but they didn’t feel any less real when the lights were out and vivid scenarios were playing in his head.

The sleepless nights those stories had brought him had led him to the conclusion that the batch didn’t need him anymore than he needed it. It was a nasty thought, so he avoided thinking about it.

So, a good clone would have jumped in horror at what the other cadet had just said.

A good clone wouldn’t have been in the Detention Center for the fifth time of the year, though.

“I understand”, Drift softy said, and with the look of relief on the boy’s face, he knew he had made the right choice.

“Thank you.”

“And I’ll help you. Hey, I didn’t ask. What’s your name?”

The boy smiled widely, and extended his arm.

“I’m Lucky.”

Drift bumped his fist, and as an eerie sense of connection waved over him, he decided that maybe he was starting to be lucky too.

\---

One month later, Ruly was finishing his second bowl of protein shake, looking over the batch schedule for the afternoon.

On the other end of the table, Drift, Thirty-Seven and Lucky were making faces at the thick mix, throwing increasingly over-the-top comparisons at the chunky food.

“It looks like a Taun-Taun vomited and then stepped all over it”, Thirty-Seven announced – the cadet still hadn’t picked a name he liked enough to keep it more than a week. Ruly had proposed ‘Versatile’, but Thirty-Seven had insisted it was stupid because he didn’t make verses. Ruly had given up trying to explain.

“It looks like half-frozen lava had a bastard child with slime mold”, Lucky added.

Shark and Fluff both snorted the goo out of their noses – probably at the vaguely implied mention of sex, which they always seemed to find hilarious. Ruly sighed internally. He liked Lucky ; he had been surprised when the cadet had shown up to their dorm and explained he was being transferred, but Kamino would dry up before Ruly questioned the decisions of his instructors. Besides, the boy was smart and quick, excelled at training, and seemed to be a really good counterpoint to Drift’s perpetual… driftiness.

(He had no idea how Lucky did it – it was a little frustrating; as far as he could remember, he had always tried his best to channel Drift and it had only earnt him insults, and the occasional bullying.)

(His hair was still growing back. And there would always be a bald patch on the back of his head.)

Still, it would have been nice to count on another mature one. But Lucky seemed to be as brilliant as he was childish. Maybe that was what worked with Drift, Ruly mused. Facts and rationality had no grip on his brother’s weird little mind, but apparently, jokes and images and silly stories did.

Whatever worked, he decided. A future squad leader shouldn’t judge his fellow clones for being slightly thick.

“It looks…” Drift slowly said. “It looks like poo.”

Shark and Fluff shrieked in laughter.

Ruly sighed, angrily forking into the muddy bowl and averting his eyes from the window right before a pair of bottles flew into the sea from above.

_Don’t judge, my butt._

\---

“What the hell, Rex?”

Rex shuffled his feet embarrassedly. His long-lasting friendship with Cody didn’t make the commander any less intimidating when he was pissed, and knowing that he was the reason of his best buddy’s predicament didn’t help.

“I don’t know”, he muttered.

“Do you have any idea how much trouble I went through for those?” Cody screeched with a vivid despair.

“I’m so sorry, Cody.”

“What were you thinking?”

Scratching the stubble on his cheeks as he vainly tried to control the blush that shame was bringing to his face, Rex coughed.

“It’s the Jedi’s fault. I, I saw her on the platform with Bly, and they were headed our way, and there were bottles everywhere…”

“So you just grabbed them and threw them out the window?” Cody wailed. “Corellian Moonshine, Rex!”

“I know. I panicked.”

“Why didn’t you just put them back in the fridge? Or stack them in the couch?”

“I thought… maybe she could feel their presence?”

“They’re Jedi, Rex”, the commander sighed, “not sniffing dogs.”

Rex muttered something inaudible where the words ‘can’t be sure’ and ‘mind-reading’ emerged.

Cody pinched the brink of his nose, breathing deeply. His captain was a fierce, loyal man who didn’t deserve any of this; besides, it wasn’t his fault if the bloody Jedi had taken it upon herself to come and visit even though poor Rex was terrified of her powers.

The commander was slightly too respectful to bitch about a general, though, so his mind jumped to whoever else he could blame for the loss of three liters of a honey-scented elixir so strong it knocked your neurons to the back of your mouth and your ass out of its pants.

He had requisitioned it (not stolen, Commander Cody didn’t steal, he just… applied his authority and prerogative of possession to stuff that just happened to lie around) with Rex on Sirel six months ago; it had been their first mission together in a while. Good memories.

“Bly”, he snarled. “What was he thinking?”

“You know what he was thinking”, Rex said with a little smile, his shoulders slackening now that he was off the hook. He sat back on the couch next to the now desperately empty drinks fridge.

Cody huffed.

“That’s super unprofessional.”

“Oh, come on”, Rex lightly said. “You gotta admit, she’s got something.”

“Yeah, a general badge and a lightsaber.”

“Not everyone is as impervious to the charms of authority as you are, old pal.”

Cody let out an outraged noise.

“Is that what I am to you?”

“A charming authority?” Rex snorted. “No chance. You’re more the stone-faced, mean-looking type. Speaking of which, did you really have to pull your little intimidation act with poor Dawn?”

“If he is what you think he is”, Cody replied, “it shouldn’t be a big deal. Besides, he didn’t look very intimidated to me.”

“Oh, are you jealous or something?” Rex taunted, putting his feet on the table.

“I’m perfectly fine with sharing the unmatched pain in the ass that is your company”, Cody snickered.

Rex smiled silently, winking back.

“So…” he said after a while.

“Yeah, I saw it too.”

“Can I talk to him, then?”

Cody thought about it for a bit.

“Yes”, he finally said. “Yes, you probably should.”

\---

Aayla was running in the rain, and she was happy.

The round platforms and narrow bridges that made the structure of the Kaminoan cities were slippery with water, the sea spray and pouring storm mixing in a showery mess around her.

Exercise held various levels of importance among the Jedi ; for some, it was a matter of balance, for others it was a prerequisite for their fighting skills.

For her, it had always been about pleasure. She liked the exhaustion, the feeling of drained muscles and pounding heart, the way the air tasted in deep-breathing lungs. She liked feeling her own speed, her agility, measuring herself to the elements as she played with her environment.

In front of her, the bridge suddenly stopped. She sped up, and felt the power rush through her thighs as she jumped. A roll later, she was running again.

Obi-Wan had offered to spar with her as training, but she had declined. As much as she liked the Jedi, long stretches and pretend fights didn’t quite do the job for her.

Besides, she needed to think.

The Council’s announcement about the clone army had deeply disturbed her, along with most of the other Jedi.

“I don’t understand”, Luminara had said in that quiet voice of hers. “Are we giving up on peace?”

“The Separatists leave us no choice”, Windu had answered with a tinge of regret. “They have been building an army…”

“So have we, apparently”, Quinlan had snapped back, and Aayla had felt a surge of affection for her former master.

Windu had winced.

“I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know how that’s possible”, he had stated. “But here’s the thing. On one side, we have a fallen Jedi backed by the Trade Federation and thousands of systems, ready to delve into war to split from the Republic…”

“Why don’t we just kriffing let them?” Quinlan had grumbled. “If they want to leave, let them leave. Why do we have to be the crazy ex-girlfriend in that scenario?”

“Because”, Windu had continued louder, “on the other side, we have the Senate and the people of the Republic who are getting very stressed at the prospect of a fractured galaxy, and with right. Look back at history, Quinlan. If the Republic falls apart, millions will pay for it with their lives.”

“The Republic _is_ falling apart, Mace”, Luminara had quietly said. “You want us to deal the final blow.”

“If we take this army”, Plo-Koon had added, his voice muffled but painful behind the vocabulator, “there is no coming back. It will sign the end of any form of diplomatic negotiations.”

“I don’t want this anymore than you do”, Windu had said. “But they made their choice. They are holding Obi-Wan and his padawan. And Senator Amidala, too.”

“I agree that we must rescue them”, Luminara had said, “but we don’t need an army for that. If the word comes out that these clones exist and that they vowed to fight for the Republic…”

“… it will sign the beginning of a war”, Mace had said. “Yes. I know.”

There had been a moment of silence then.

“What happened to being peace-keepers?” Quinlan had snorted, his laughter entirely devoid of amusement.

“His own path, away from peace, Dooku has chosen”, Yoda had replied, and they had all seen the pain in his eyes.

“But do we have to choose the same one?” Plo had pleaded.

“It’s out of our hands”, Windu had told him gently. “I agree with you. But here we are, in the middle of this all, with one hundred thousand soldiers out there waiting for us to tell them what to do.”

“If we give the Senate an army”, Quinlan had insisted, “they’ll just take the opportunity to go and meddle with people’s business for their own interest.”

“The Republic, we serve”, Yoda had finally said, his voice soft but inflexible. “Its unity, we must defend.”

“But at what cost?” Aayla had asked the Grand Master.

He hadn’t answered that, and the question haunted her.

She grabbed the scaffolding above her head, hauling herself up to the upper level, and continued running. The wind was howling around the city, high waves crashing onto the pillars, the clouds swirling black above her head. There was a strange pleasure in having a storm outside that matched the one inside her head.

There was something else that bothered her.

Going at war had been a hardship, but it wouldn’t have been that bad if they had been using droids, or if the people depending on her had actively chosen to fight in it.

Bly had tried to reassure her when they had first met and she had expressed her doubts, he had told her that they knew of the importance of the Republic and they were eager to defend it, but…

But there was something in the beautiful, starry eyes of the Kaminoans that didn’t feel right.

She had heard that the white, clinical appearance of their structures were a delusion; that their own eyes saw patterns there, in colors invisible to anyone else. Aayla couldn’t help but think that maybe it applied to more than the buildings.

She was troubled, and her trouble echoed in the Force.

As usual, she was letting it guide her steps as she made her way through the storm. Many Jedi were startled when they reached the point in their formation where the Force started to feel like an active presence instead of a passive resource; many wondered what it was, what it wanted, and what it meant if it truly had a will of its own…

Aayla had never given much thought to it. The Twi’leks of her homeworld had a much more spiritual approach, suggesting that the Force merely was an amplifier of the soul. There was nothing in it that you didn’t pour yourself, and the guidance it gave was the one you were unconsciously seeking.

Listening to the Force was listening to yourself.

So Aayla kept running, and she listened.

Not far below, there was a narrow scaffold above the sea; she jumped through, feeling a burst of pain and terror in the Force as she did.

_Ah._

It had to be where Rali had found the clone that had almost fallen overboard, she mused. She had immediately trotted to the next clone she had found, pulled his sleeve, and had him alert the patrol, which had gained her some clear affection from the soldiers.

Her tiny padawan was still shy around others, but she was fierce and extraordinarily empathetic. She could feel people’s feelings in a way that Aayla didn’t even comprehend; her own perception of the Force was more linked to life and environment than spirit, but she did her best to emulate the little girl and help her grow.

Rali saw feelings with a clarity that made Aayla feel short-sighted, but it only made her proud. The little Devaronian had been through way too many hardships for a child so young, and she had sworn that she would give her the love and support life had so cruelly denied her.

The wave of terror passed as she moved ahead, trying to focus on her own presence in the Force. There was something nearby calling for her, like the promise of an answer to a question she hadn’t yet asked.

A leap across the nearest platform, three meters of void ahead with the sea raging around as if it was trying to catch her, and she felt it. She maintained her rhythm, breathing deeply as the rain and seawater soaked her, following the thread across the rail, over the ledge, and…

Her feet thumped as she landed on a covered terrace, and she was greeted by a high-pitched screech as she startled the clones there.

There were two of them, the screaming one bald and stocky, the other sitting shirtless with what appeared to be a tattoo in progress on his pectoral.

The bald one was clenching his mouth, looking every shade of mortified at the unholy sound that had just come out of him, the other laughing heartily.

“I am so sorry”, Aayla quickly apologized, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

The bald one muttered something muffled in his hand, still holding the inking pen in the other.

“I didn’t expect anyone to be outside with that weather”, the Jedi said, fully conscious that she wasn’t exactly setting the example.

“It’s not bad under here”, the other clone commented with a familiar smile. “And I like being outside.”

She recognized him in a flash – the clone Rex had introduced the day before, the flame-thrower obsessed, flirty guy that she didn’t seem to intimidate one bit. The pull in the Force stopped right around him, as if she had reached the end of the thread.

There _was_ something about him, she mused. Something different, not loud enough to be obvious, but definitely there. She wondered what Rali had thought of their meeting.

“The view is pretty amazing”, Aayla confirmed. “You’re Dawn, right?”

The bald one turned to him with an incredulous look.

“Yes”, Dawn said with that secret smile of his. “And this is Jesse. Best sniper and inker you have ever met.”

Jesse was blushing hard now, blabbering something as he executed a hasty salute.

The Jedi gave him an appeasing smile, and sat on the ledge next to the pair.

“So”, she casually said as she stroked the water out of her lekku bands. “You guys come here often?”

Dawn winked at her with a scandalously handsome grin.

Jesse blinked in confusion, and hesitantly answered:

“Not really, no. It’s just adjacent to the relaxing lounge, you know. And since some of them little fuckers complained about the smell, we had to relocate, and… Not that I mean any disrespect to my fellow soldiers, of course.”

“Cut the crap, Jesse”, Dawn said as he stretched. “They are little fuckers. Ink doesn’t smell that bad.”

“It doesn’t”, Aayla agreed.  “Though to be honest, I currently smell like a wet akk dog, so I couldn’t really say anything.”

Dawn burst out laughing, and gestured her to sit next to him.

“It is a very nice tattoo”, the Jedi said with admiration, trying not to stare at the muscle underneath. “Rhodian inspiration?”

“Actually, yes”, Jesse said with surprise. “I like their art. You’re into ink?”

“I have a few myself”, she said, “but none as good as yours.”

The clone looked as taken aback as if she had told him she had a secret third boob.

Rolling her pants from her ankle with difficulty (wet leather wasn’t exactly cooperative), she pointed at the white arabesques on her calf.

“Oh, nice!” Jesse said, instinctively reaching for the tattoo. A look of horror came to his face when he realized he was basically fondling her leg, and he promptly retreated his hand.

“Sorry”, he blurted out.

Aayla couldn’t help laughing, and gave him an impish grin.

“Don’t worry, Jesse. I don’t mind.”

“They’re really pretty.”

“You think so? I like them, but I always thought they were pretty messy. I made them myself.”

Jesse stared at her with unfiltered amazement.

“Is it me, or do I hear violins in the distance?” Dawn snickered.

“You’re just jealous”, Aayla replied.

“You do know that clones are the sharing type, right?”

The playfulness in the man’s voice brought a flush to her lekku.

_Shit, this one is good._

“Is it your sinya’ra, then?” Dawn asked more seriously as Jesse contemplated the patterns.

The Twi’lek blinked in surprise, the familiarity of her mother-tongue hitting her like thunder.

“How do you possibly know about that?”

“He’s our local dataworm”, Jesse absently said, tracing the wavy lines on her calf with a prudent finger. “What is this word, that I’m not gonna risk repeating and making a fool of myself in the process, supposed to mean?”

“It’s a… a Twi’lek thing”, Aayla replied, slightly shaken. “A personal mark that you draw for yourself to help you stay centered. It means soul-picture, basically.”

“Ah. We call those heart ink”, Jesse knowingly said. “The one tat’ you pick that sums up everything you are, right?”

“…Yes. Which one is yours?”

The clone stroked his inner wrist, where an intricate pattern followed the veins. Dawn looked at him with a smile full of something else, sad and deep and painful.

“And since it’s your first”, Jesse jokingly said as he turned to him, “I guess yours is this one now.”

“I guess”, Dawn replied softly.

“Aaand I’m out of ink again”, he sighed. “You stay here?”

Aayla nodded, although the question was obviously for Dawn. As the clone left, she felt the pull of the Force again, compelling her to ask.

“So, now that we’re practically intimate”, she said. “Can I ask you something a little… off the record?”

Dawn looked at her with piercing eyes, and after a second that felt like an eternity, he nodded.

“Are you… happy?”

The man stayed silent for a while, holding her gaze with those beautiful brown eyes (the Kaminoans had picked a hell of a fine template, she had first thought when meeting Bly).

“Having second thoughts about your clone army, master Jedi?” Dawn finally asked, his face inscrutable.

“Yes”, she replied frankly. “You know… or maybe you don’t. In which case, don’t tell I was the one who told you. But the Jedi Council didn’t order this.”

Dawn just smiled, and she instantly knew – somehow, he knew already.

“But they condone it”, he softly replied. “They found out about the perfect unlimited army, and they took it.”

“Yes”, Aayla admitted.

“And now you’re wondering what it makes of you.”

“What do you mean?”

Dawn crossed his arms across his chest, the half-finished sun poking from behind his biceps in a fairly enticing illustration of his name.

“The clones have been created with a purpose”, he stated. “We were born to fill a job. Nobody ever gave us another choice. There is a word for that, you know.”

 _Slavery,_ Aayla’s mind provided, and a nasty taste came to her mouth.

“The men fighting under your command may be happy to be here”, Dawn continued. “But if they aren’t, there isn’t much they can do about it.”

“Can’t you…” the Jedi lamely asked. “I don’t even know. Can’t you become something else? Chose to walk away?”

“Fun little fact about people who aren’t recognized as sentient beings by the Senate they serve”, Dawn cheerfully replied. “Legally, they’re things. And things that don’t fulfill their purpose, well…”

There was a darkness about the man that even she could feel in the Force.

“Well, what?” she asked, a cold feeling pouring through her heart.

A silence stretched between them, the clone looking down as if he was measuring his options. After a while, he looked back at her.

“I don’t know”, he admitted in a low voice. “There are… rumors.”

“Tell me”, Aayla urged him. “Dawn, please. Tell me.”

The mere idea of finding herself on that side of slavery was giving her nausea  – flashes of memory coming unbidden to her mind, screams and tears and the smell of burnt trees. But the trouble in Dawn’s eyes was somehow even worse.

“I heard stories”, he whispered, barely audible with the storm hitting the panel above their heads. “I’m not sure yet of what’s true. I’m… looking into it.”

“Can I help?”

The distress in her voice brought a sad smile to his lips, and he stared at her silently for a while.

“It really bothers you”, he observed.

“Of course it bloody does”, she snapped. “I became a Jedi to be a peace keeper. And now I’m fighting a war. I walked away from my people to help protecting the innocent. And now…”

“Now you’re leading them to their deaths”, Dawn finished.

The Jedi’s throat clamped shut.

“I don’t want to”, she said miserably.

“No”, the clone said. “No, you really don’t, do you?”

His gaze softened, and he reached out to her, patting her arm gently.

“Protect them”, he said. “Save them. Let them know you’re on their side. They will need you.”

The kindness in the man’s eyes went right through her heart, and she grabbed his hand, squeezing his fingers tightly.

“I will”, she promised in a hoarse voice.

The door to the relaxing area hissed open as Jesse returned, and the clone looked at the pair of them with wide eyes.

“Uh”, he said while staring at their joined hands, “should I come back later? I should come back later. I’ll come back later.”

Dawn burst out laughing, and stroked her thumb before letting go.

“Don’t be such a prude, Jesse. We’re just two buddies holding hands in the rain.”

“Right”, Aayla laughed as the tension vanished. “Nothing weird to that.”

“Most people left for lunch”, Jesse said with a face that said he was absolutely not convinced. “We can go back inside.”

“I’ll finish my run”, the Jedi said. “See you later?”

“Anytime”, Dawn replied as he got up, ignoring Jesse’s nervous chuckle.

She gave the clone a last look before jumping out into the storm again.

The call in the Force wasn’t any quieter. There would be fights to fight that had nothing to do with the war.

But at least, she knew she wouldn’t stand alone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (This is about half the content of the chapter, but uuuh it’s 6k already so I’ll post it like that while I finish the Jango-part. Besides, it’s a nice little interlude with outer POVs !)


	8. The Edge of Choice (part 1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hey everyone! I’m aliiiiive and well, just been heavily focusing on my first original work these last months (guess who has two thumbs and is gonna be a published writer by the end of the year?) (yeah i’m optimistic af I’ve decided it was my 2018 mood).  
> Needed a lil break and I was missing all those idiots so here is the sequel of Bounty Hunter Dad and his million children, featuring Dramaaa and Things Finally Happening. Many many thanks to all those of you who have reviewed or liked this, you’re giving me life and I hope you enjoy this!!!

Jango was dreaming of a farm.

The sun was setting in the purple sky, the moons shining bright in the distance, above the roof where Cad and Zam were playing what looked like a game of strip pazaac.

On his knees, a baby was cooing softly, munching on a carrot.

A persistent noise was ringing in the air, filling him with dread.

“It’s the ground”, Bane cheered while jumping out of his pants. “It moves.”

It _was_ moving now, Jango realized in horror – a crack opening under his feet, giving into a familiar abyss. The darkness was watching him from below, thousands of invisible eyes grabbing at him, the force of their stare pulling him closer…

And then something pushed him in the back, and he fell.

He woke up instantly, panting for air that smelled like laundered sheets and the unmistakable scent of four physically active men sharing a cramped dorm.

He jerked when he felt a pressure against his back, blindly reaching for the intruder, until his eyes got accustomed to the darkness and he recognized Tup.

The clone was perched at the end of his bed, and was apparently trying to make himself look as small as possible, which was no modest feat.

Jango popped his earplugs out, suddenly filling the world with the sound of his men’s breaths, the storm outside and, buzzing in the soft silence like a terrible flute solo in a requiem, Stealth’s obnoxious snoring.

“What the hell, Tup?” he asked, with a frustration that was melting by the second at the clone’s terrified look.

The clone silently pointed at the center of the room.

A silhouette was standing there unmoving, glowing pale in the emergency lights of the ceiling.

The occasional lightning drew bursts of white on his naked chest.

Jango blinked.

“What? That’s Jesse. He sleepwalks. You know that”, he whispered while trying to push the clone off his bed.

“But look!” Tup pleaded, pointing at Jesse who was slowly turning around, looking everywhere with dead eyes. “That’s scary as shit, man – I went out to pee and he was like this when I came back, and- and…”

“Heh”, Jesse suddenly laughed. “Heh. Heh.”

He made his way towards them, and Tup clang tightly to Jango’s back.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake”, he groaned. “Will you stop being such a baby?”

“Heh?” Jesse asked while slowly patting Tup’s empty bed. “Heh. Heh.”

“I’m not going back there”, Tup hissed while wrapping himself around his back like he was a safety buoy. “Let me sleep with you?”

“What difference does it bloody make?” Jango annoyingly asked, vainly trying to regain his space.

_Shit, I’ve gotten bad at wrestling. I’ll need to work on that._

“Get off me”, he groaned. “It’s just Jesse. Get up and lead him back to his own bed before he gets out and mmrpph.”

“Shhh”, Tup begged while putting his hand on his mouth. “And don’t move. I think his vision is based on movement.”

Jango bit on the outrageous hand, causing a startled yelp out of the clone’s mouth.

“Tup, I swear to hell – oh, fuck.”

Jesse had turned to them, his eyes reflecting the storm with an eldritch glow. Tup squeaked in Jango’s back, and proceeded to try and tuck himself under his cover.

“Heh.”

This was all the warning they got before the clone leaped at them with an uncanny agility, pinning the pair down with his weight.

Jango felt his ribs protest under the shock, and he swore loudly as he tried to wrench himself free from both Tup’s grasp and the mass of stocky sniper currently giggling in his pillow.

“That’s it”, he firmly addressed nobody in particular. “I’m deserting. You people can handle yourselves on your own.”

With a carefully levered push on Jesse’s torso, he managed to lift the clone’s deadweight just enough to slide under his arm, leaving a squealing Tup to wriggle in the imprisoning sheets, Jesse still faceplanting over him.

“Dawn!”

“Fuck off”, Jango muttered as he got up on unsteady legs. “Need sleep. G’night.”

His brain took half a second to decide between the two free beds – _Tup leaves hair on pillow, but smells like soap. Jesse has no hair but leaves… nope. Not getting in there. Nope nope nope. Tup’s it is._

“Dawn!”

“Good night, children”, he firmly said. “And remember, no fucking in my dorm.”

He pulled the cover over his head, and ignored the clone’s swearing as he went back to sleep.

\---

He woke up to an insistent poking in the small of his back.

“Have any of you people heard about physical boundaries?” he groaned into his pillow.

“Sorry, dude”, Stealth’s voice cheerfully said. “Should I get the honk instead?”

“Screw you, Stealth.”

“Good morning to you too, beloved vod.”

“Hrmph.”

“How did you even get the name Dawn?” Stealth wondered as he sat on his bed, bouncing on the mattress a little. “You should have stuck with Riley.”

Jango sighed loudly, and tried to kick the clone off the narrow cot. He failed.

 _Riley_.

He had never really given much thought to the clone whose place he had taken, but suddenly the idea of him was overwhelming.

He had taken everything from him. His identity, his place, even his name.

 _What did he think of me?_ the bounty hunter wondered. _Would he have liked knowing that his death helped saving me? Or was he one of those who would have rejoiced upon hearing I died?_

Riley had been passed as him too, he recalled. Incinerated in a Mandalorian armor, under a name that wasn’t his; he wondered if the clone would have considered it an honor or an insult.

There were only few people who seemed to remember him – which was heart-wrenching as it was – but for those who had known him… How would Riley have reacted knowing another took his place, talked to those he would never talk to again, outperformed him on the tests, and gave a new personality and a new name to his number?

_Would he have liked his life being continued by someone else?_

Jango wasn’t sure what to think. Did it count as maintaining a legacy when he had stolen his identity?

Did it matter that he was trying to do good?

“Please help?” somebody squeaked from the other end of the room.

Stealth looked up, and started laughing like a maniac.

“Oh, Dawn, you’re gonna want to see this.”

“He’s eating me”, Tup screeched.

With a sigh so deep that it sent long, luscious stray hairs flying away from the pillow, Jango rose up.

He stared silently at the vision in his own bed for a good ten seconds before slowly sinking back into the pillow.

_Way too early for me to deal with that shit._

“That’s your fault”, Stealth laughed. “You always wash your hair with sweet-smelling stuff, it was bound to attract predators at some point.”

“Just get him off me, you close-snouted Bantha!”

Completely oblivious to the ruckus around him, Jesse kept sleeping peacefully, chewing on a mouthful of Tup’s hair. The clone was desperately trying to tug the drooly strands out of his brother’s teeth, whimpering a variety of complaints.

“Jesse”, Stealth gently called while shaking him a little. “Hey, Jesse.”

“He can’t hear”, Tup yelled. “We’re all wearing earplugs because _someone_ snores like a broken M7 engine!”

“Hey”, Stealth protested. “It’s not my fault I got my nose broken by General Kenobi. If anything, you should complain to him.”

“I’m not gonna walk to some Jedi and tell him he’s ruined my night life because the hair-eating sleepwalker started wearing earplugs after he kicked a septum deviation into you!”

 _If Riley had to face this kind of crap with his own squad_ , Jango decided, _he probably would have been fine passing the torch._

It was at this point that Jesse loudly yawned, coughed on the hair in his mouth, and opened his eyes.

He stared at Tup for a while as the clone retrieved his damp strands, whining something about shampoo schedules.

“Sup”, Jesse said while popping one earplug out. “Whatcha doing in my bed?”

“It’s not your bed!” Tup yelled.

“It’s not yours either”, Jango said in a muffled groan from the depths of Tup’s pillow – which he had to admit, despite the occasional stray hair, _did_ smell wonderful.

Jesse rose up on his elbows, cracking his neck.

“Ah”, he prudently said. “So. What happened?”

“You need to work on that oral fixation of yours, is what happened”, Tup grumbled as he finally managed to wrench himself free from the bed. He headed for the fresher while holding the infamous hair away from his face, complaining to nobody in particular.

Stealth blinked in silence.

“And here I thought he was the mellow type”, he commented.

“Have you seen him in practice?” Jango replied without moving. “He’s a wild beast under that mane.”

“Yeah, but still. Duly noted, don’t mess with Tup’s hair.”

Jesse scratched his shaven head with a shameful look.

“I’m sorry. Why didn’t you guys wake me up?”

“We tried”, Stealth accused. “And for the record, it’s not my fault if I snore. You are the heaviest sleeper I have ever met, Jesse.”

“Yeah, I know”, the clone muttered in embarrassment.

Jango sighed deeply, feeling a shame in the clone’s voice that Stealth had obviously not noticed.

“If I had wanted more children”, he groaned, “I’d have just made some. Can’t believe I’m stuck with you people without even getting a fuck out of it.”

“You know you just have to ask”, Jesse absently commented as he looked at a bruise on his knee.

“Nah. Come on, let’s go get breakfast. Stealth, you mind waiting for Tup? Just in case he shampoos himself into another headache crisis.”

“Roger that”, Stealth said while jumping back on his mattress.

“Atta boy.”

Jango quickly put on a shirt, and headed out with a contrite Jesse.

They walked in silence for a while as he waited for the clone to talk first.

“I’m really sorry”, he blurted out as they passed the corridor leading to the refectory.

“Don’t worry about it. Tup is bitchy when it comes to his hair.”

“No, I… I kinda get it”, he shrugged. “Sleep is very important in our recovery, and if I just mess with everyone’s rest, then…”

“Then what?” Jango softly asked as they filled their trays with toasts, caf and nutrient-rich, muddy-looking rations.

“I don’t know.”

The clone shrugged again, and then laughed with a smile that was too broad to be genuine.

“Maybe you should just tie me to the bed like my old squad.”

 _Your old squad did that?_ he almost asked in outrage, but he bit his tongue. Jesse talked about them about as often as he did, which was never. He wouldn’t push him onto that subject.

“No”, he simply said.

Jesse winked with an obscene grin as they sat down.

“You don’t know. Maybe I liked it.”

Jango held the clone’s gaze for a moment, before gently repeating:

“No.”

Jesse’s smile broke down a little then, and he moved his eyes back to his plate.

“Good”, he said in a blank tone. “I didn’t.”

The bounty hunter silently reached for him, and squeezed his forearm.

“We’re vode, Jesse”, he said. “We take care of each other. We watch out for each other. And sometimes, yes, we endure each other. Stealth snores, Tup has his headaches, you crash in other people’s beds and occasionally wander to the armory naked in the middle of the night…”

“… and you have the winning charms of a morning person”, Jesse chuckled with a warmer smile.

“Oh, do fuck off. I don’t like being woken up early.”

“For a guy named Dawn…”

“I know.”

“Thanks. You’re the best.”

“He’s the worst”, another voice grumbled behind them as a clone sat at their table.

“Morning, Rex”, Jango saluted. “What did I do this time?”

The captain stared at him for a second before whipping out a datapad, slamming it under his nose.

“Look at what Cody sent me!” the clone complained.

It took Jango a few sips of disgusting caf to distinguish the holo in front of him – a tooka with fluffy white fur was looking up in confusion, tilting his head at the camera, his long ears flopping around as he did.

Cody had typed _“When the Jedis say you can’t use the Giant Ion Cannon”_ under it.

An irrepressible burst of laughter made its way to Jango’s throat, shaking his shoulders as he tried to bit the inside of his cheeks.

“There’s dozens”, Rex groaned, scrolling up in his messaging history with the commander. “He keeps sending me those.”

“It does look a little like you”, Jesse interjected, his neck strained to see. “With the white hair and all. Oh, this one is a cutie!”

Rex huffed as he grabbed his datapad back, and Jango had to breathe in deeply to try and calm himself.

“Well, I’m sorry, captain”, he said while wiping out his tears, “but I have no regret.”

“Of course you don’t.”

“Oh, come on”, Jesse said. “It’s cute. And it shows he likes you.”

A hint of something went through Rex’ eyes that told Jango the clone didn’t need to be shown that.

 _Good for you two_ , he thought fondly.

“If I may, sir?” Jango said while looking the captain in the eye.

Rex raised an eyebrow.

“Why don’t you pay him back in kind? I’m sure you can find an animal somewhere that fits the bill.”

The captain pondered for a while, and then his smile widened dangerously.

“I can probably find a thing or two. Oh, on a completely unrelated note, Dawn, we need to talk.”

Jango felt a tinge of anxiety in his throat, that he chased in annoyance. He was a grown-ass man, a fearless bounty hunter, a Mandalorian warrior. He didn’t get anxiety at the idea that someone wanted to talk to him.

“Tomorrow morning, the Officers Lounge?” the captain proposed while reading something on his datapad. “Something just came up, I have to head back.”

“Is there a problem?” Jango asked without being able to completely mask his trouble, to his greatest embarrassment.

“No, don’t worry. Just something we need to talk about.”

“Right”, the bounty hunter said as Rex got up and made his way out. “No worry. Of course.”

Jesse laughed.

“Oh, come on, man. He loves you. Everyone does. There is no way you’re in trouble.”

“Uh-huh”, Jango nodded. “I’m lovable. Totally.”

He absent-mindedly forked into his bowl, trying not to panic. There was no way Rex had figured out who he was, was there? If he had, he strongly doubted his reaction would have been a casual invitation to a private talk.

Unless, some part of him whispered inside his brain, it was a trap.

He had a reputation after all, and they all knew what he is capable of, and surely the best way to deal with a deadly bounty hunter was to lure him into a false sense of security, to bring him somewhere safe, where he couldn’t take hostages or cause casualties in his escape…

Somehow, that thought hurt Jango more than the idea of having been discovered.

_Is that truly what you think of me?_

And another thought, even more painful:

_They are not wrong. One month ago, I would have._

He wondered if there was a way he could explain all this to Rex – that he had not known at the time, that he had refused to know, but that he was trying now, trying his best to make it up to them, to all of them and not just the one he had picked for himself…

Boba, he suddenly thought, and his heart skipped a beat.

Had they found out about him too? Or was it about him altogether? Had Rex dug about the Lucky cadet, and learnt something had happened to him?

His vision started to blur, and he didn’t even feel the glass breaking in his fist.

“Holy shit, man”, Jesse exclaimed from far away.

He felt the clone grab his hand, forcing it open. The contact made him return to reality; he looked at the man who was staring at him with a care he had never noticed, and his throat tightened.

_Oh, Jesse._

His heart sank in his chest as his thoughts raced. What would become of the clone if Rex had uncovered him? How would he react to hearing that his friend -  that his brother – was a fraud, the ruthless assassin who had worked for the very people they fought on the battlefield?

“Hey, Dawn”, the clone murmured, looking him straight in the eye while squeezing his hand. “Are you okay?”

“I…” Jango said in a distant voice. “Yes. Sorry about that.”

“Alright”, Jesse nodded. “How about we get out of here, try not to raise any further attention, and you tell me what the hell is going on?”

“…Yeah.”

Jesse patted him on the forearm, in a touching replication of Jango’s earlier gesture.

They got up, heading for the walkway that crisscrossed above the refectory. There were seldom people there, and he took a deep breath as he leaned against the rail.

Jesse was standing right beside him, a look of concern on his hardened face.

Jango tried to laugh it off.

“My bad. Got a little panic attack with Rex stressing me out and everything.”

“Right”, the clone said.

“Also, I didn’t sleep very well.”

“Hmm.”

“I’m fine now.”

“Sure.”

A silence stretched between them as Jesse stared him down. After a while, it was his voice, soft and quiet, which broke it.

“Cut the crap, Dawn.”

Jango opened his mouth to protest, but found nothing to say against the kindness that shone in his duplicate’s eyes.

“You said it yourself, not a minute ago. We look out for each other. You’re always supporting us. Let yourself get some support, too.”

Something broke inside his heart, cutting his voice in his throat. Silently, he reached for the clone, and pulled him into a strong hug.

Jesse chuckled.

“It’s alright, buddy. We’ve all been there. Now, you wanna talk about it? Or just hug it out?”

The bounty hunter sighed deeply, resting his aching forehead on the clone’s shoulder.

“I’m… a little worried about that thing with Rex.”

“Why? He loves you. For all you know, he’s inviting you on a date.”

“I doubt that.”

“If I were a captain, I’d _order_ you on a date.”

Jango snorted.

“See, maybe that’s why you’re not an officer.”

They stood there for a minute, Jesse’s thick arms wrapped around him in an embrace he hadn’t realized he needed.

 _I can’t leave you_ , he suddenly realized. _None of you, not like that._

He had always known that at some point, he would have to head back to his old life; there would come a day when he would find Boba, steal a ship, and fly off into the sunset never to return.

He would leave Kamino and the clones, call his old contacts, and get back into business…

For the first time though, he was realizing everything he would leave behind.

Rex and Wolffe, Stealth and Tup and Jesse. Their nights bickering in the dorm, in a casual companionship he hadn’t felt in years. The smile on Sergeant Boost’s face during their training sessions, the offkey singing of Fives in the showers, the trust and support he intuitively felt coming from all the clones…

On his pectoral, the tattooed sun was stinging like a painful reminder.

It wasn’t just about leaving, either.

They would die. All of them, probably – at some point, one after the other, like soldiers did. A vision of Tup’s ink tear drowned in real ones flashed before his closed eyelids – Stealth’s smile would die on his lips as one of the explosions he was so fond of took him away, and Jesse would lie on the ground, a faceless armor in the rain, his precise hands grasping useless at the ground…

His fists clenched into the clone’s shirt, and he bit the inside of his cheeks until the taste of blood came tinging his tongue.

It was unfair, it was wrong, and it was his fault.

Jesse’s wide hand was gently stroking his back, and the comfort the clone was pouring in the gesture was nauseating.

“I don’t deserve you”, he muttered miserably.

“Of course you do”, Jesse replied. “I have no fucking clue what you’re rambling about, but dude, you deserve everything.”

 _You’re right_ , he thought bitterly. _I deserve this._

_I deserve losing you. After everything I’ve done, it’s only fair that it hits me in the face. It’s justice._

_But I don’t have to accept it._

He breathed in deeply, squeezing Jesse’s massive frame as tightly as he could before letting go.

The clone bumped his forehead with his before stepping back.

“Thanks.”

“Anytime. You wanna go shoot stuff at practice now? That always cheers me up.”

Jango couldn’t help chuckling.

“There’s just something I must do first.”

“Can I help?”

The words echoed those of Aayla the day before – the Jedi had surprised him with her honesty, and the kindness in her eyes had moved him more than he dared confess.

He almost automatically said ‘No’, but something held him back. He was tired, he realized, tired of facing everything on his own. He couldn’t tell Jesse the truth, but maybe there was a way to let him in, just a little, just enough for him to help…

He bit his lip as he thought, and slowly said:

“I need to go to the medbay.”

“Right”, Jesse approved. “Kix is a great listener, you should talk to him and get some rest…”

“No”, Jango replied softly, determination crawling up in his bones, steeling them in its wake.

He would leave alright, but not before he had settled some matters. Whatever was happening here, whatever game the Kaminoans and Count Dooku were playing, he would find out.

And he would end it.

“I have to talk to Carrots.”

Jesse looked at him curiously, but he nodded and followed in his steps.

\--

There was a massive disorder in front of the medbay when they arrived; several clones were standing about, looking a mix of embarrassed and concerned that spoke of stupid accidents and/or regrettable bets. Jango’s money was on the latter.

He elbowed his way in as Jesse stayed behind to ask what was going on.

The yell that hit him when the door opened almost made him step back.

“-don’t care if the Jedis can fly, Hardcase. You are _not_ a fucking Jedi!”

“Well I don’t haff the Forshe”, a slurred voice argued behind a white panel, “but I have forshe. I thought… why’m talking like thish?”

“Shock”, an annoyed voice replied. “This is going to hurt. Sucks to be you.”

“M’not afraid of pain, it’s jush – ow ow ow!”

“I would like to say that it will teach you, but I’m not stupid enough to delude myself into thinking that you could ever learn from your mistakes.”

“Washn’t a mishtake”, Hardcase garbled. “Succesh.”

“Breaking both your arms after launching yourself from a supply cannon is not a success.”

“I landed the landing, Kiksh”, the clone mumbled. “And I – ow!”

Jango was starting to think that maybe he should come back later, when Kix cheerfully said:

“Hi, Dawn. Give me a minute while I finish patching up Mister Stupid here.”

“How did you know I was here?” Jango enquired while raising his brow.

“I’m a telepath”, Kix blankly answered. “Also we’ve got cameras.”

“… Right.”

He leaned against one of the white panels that split the medbay in as many cubicles, waiting as Kix called to dispatch Hardcase from the emergency area into one of the private spaces.

His eyes lazily followed the Kaminoan patterns drawn in invisible paint on the walls – which weren’t as invisible as the cloners liked to think; he couldn’t see colors there, but when he narrowed his eyes and the light hit them in the right angle, the ink was gleaming slightly, just enough for one to pick up the trail and follow it…

“Sorry about the wait”, Kix said as he emerged from behind a panel covered in thin spirals.

“Supply cannon?” Jango asked casually.

Medical secrecy was not exactly a thing on Kamino, where every intervention and exam was carefully filed for cloners and officers to see; but Kix was discreet, and Jango could only hope that his love for complaining would be stronger than his demureness.

“The thing we use to shoot food rations, medical supplies and emergency packages at civilians above blockades?” Kix sighed. “ _Someone_ thought it would be a good idea to stuff himself into it.”

“I’m an emergenshy package”, Hardcase laughed in the distance. “My package is…”

There was a click and a loud thump, that suspiciously sounded like the thick head of a clone hitting the stretchers after getting a sudden hypodermal shot.

“Thank the Force”, the medic muttered as he closed the cubicle, bringing a modicum of privacy to them. “Now, what’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing”, Jango started, but the clone cut him.

“Oh, please. Don’t play that game”, he complained. “I’ve had a busy day, I’m tired of being diplomatic, and quite frankly I’ve seen it all.”

“No, really- “

“How about you cut the crap and sit down?” Kix said while pushing him firmly to the exam bench.

He stopped for a second, looked him up and down, and asked in a deadpan tone while looking at him straight in the eye:

“ _Can_ you sit down?”

“Yes, I can”, Jango patiently said, “but I’m not here for that. I just wanted to see Carrots.”

“Is that a guy or a euphemism?”

“… A guy. It’s a guy. What would it even mean, Kix?”

“I don’t know”, the medic said with an annoyed hand waving. “You people and your metaphors for stupidly risky stuff. Getting the waters. Seeing the krayt dragon. Pulling the sabaac’s tongue.”

Jango opened his mouth to ask what those meant, thought about it for a second, and closed it back without a word. Sometimes ignorance was bliss.

“I’ll check where he is”, Kix said while pulling a datapad out of his apron. “Why didn’t you say so earlier?”

“Because”, the bounty hunter said, “you were glaring at my crotch like it had personally offended you. Which was sort of scary, mind you.”

“True, I’m terrifying”, the medic casually said. “Carrots…”

Kix pondered while drumming absently on the bench.

“It’s the one who fell over, right?”

“Yes”, the bounty hunter confirmed. “I heard he had a couple of broken ribs and shit…?”

“Ah, yes, I remember. Well, we fixed his ribs and shit, like you say”, Kix shrugged, “and he decided that he would rest better in his dorm than in here. Which is a wise decision, let me tell you.”

“He got out?” Jango protested. “But it was just two days ago!”

“A lot of people don’t like the medbay”, Kix said. “I’d feel offended, but quite frankly I get it. It can get a bit oppressive in here. Not to mention the stupid-ass brothers who think they’re emergency packages and come in yelling that their arms are falling off.”

The bounty hunter repressed an annoyed huff.

“How long ago was it?”

“Just a few hours, actually. He said something about going to the library to get occupation, if I recall correctly.”

“Great. Thanks, Kix.”

“Sure. Hey, while you’re at it, can you remind Jesse that his shots are overdue?”

Jango hummed noncommittally, knowing the clone hated doing those as much as he did. He wondered idly if there was a possibility for phobias to be passed genetically, or if it was just a common consequence of an overly-medical environment. (Pretty as the Kaminoans were, Taun-We armed with a probe was a nightmarish vision.)

“And I don’t want him complaining about needles, they’re only twice as large as the ones he uses for inking!” Kix yelled as he made his way out.

Jesse paled, and both of them scampered away quickly.

“He’s lying”, the clone said. “I got my shots alright. He just likes torturing me.”

“I believe you.”

“So, are we going to shoot at stuff now?”

Jango smiled, and shook his head.

“Carrots is in the library, apparently. Do you want to come along? If you want to go practicing instead…”

“Nuh-uh”, said Jesse. “I’m sticking with you until you tell me what it’s all about.”

The bounty hunter eyed him thoughtfully as they walked down the corridors. He still wasn’t sure what to tell the clone; Jesse wasn’t exactly the tight-lipped type, and the idea of getting him in trouble was unacceptable.

Still, the man had proven himself loyal and deceptively smart under his brash attitude.

He waited until they reached a crowded hall to speak again – it was always easier to talk without being heard in a loud place than a quiet one. People always assumed that hushed whispers in empty rooms stayed there, but in the silence they were like music to cautious ears.

In the cacophony of the clone crowd, they could speak freely.

“I think Carrots knows something, and he got in trouble for it”, he said blankly as they elbowed their way through.

Jesse stared at him for a second, hurrying to keep up with his pace.

“What?” he replied in a whisper.

“Don’t whisper”, Jango said. “Makes you look suspicious. Come on, let’s go.”

“What thing?” the sniper asked with huge eyes.

“I’m not sure yet. Act natural.”

“Dude”, Jesse hissed as they got to an elevator, “you can’t just drop something like that and ask me to act natural. What does that even mean, act natural? Am I supposed to drop on all fours and howl?”

“Is that… is that a thing you do on the regular?”

“No. Maybe. Not the point. I meant natural like in nature.”

“People in nature don’t go on all fours and howl. Unless they’re Scimatee.”

“That a species?”

“Yep. That goes around on all fours and communicates with voice modulations.”

“That’s fascinating”, the clone said behind gritted teeth, “but can we go back to the conspiration theory thing?”

“Sure”, Jango said pleasantly. “I’m half certain that the Kaminoans are not playing all their cards on the table, that the Jedi have no idea what’s going on, that we’re stuck in the middle of it all, and that Carrots was almost murdered because he knows shit he shouldn’t. Probably.”

The words had just come spilling from his mouth, but the look on the sniper’s face made it entirely worth the trouble. A strange euphoria was coming over Jango, like all the care in the world had just vanished from his mind.

He was done, he realized. Done playing the secrecy game, done shutting his eyes in the face of the universe. The abyss had caught up, and he was waving at it.

It felt surprisingly good. He had heard stories of death-row inmates becoming light-hearted jokers before their final moments, and never really believed those; yet what he felt reminded him of it. He had no doubt that a storm was coming their way, and that he would face the consequences of his actions before long. Maybe it didn’t matter that he stopped following the convoluted trails of his former clients’ plans. Maybe it was too late to cut through it all and go his own way.

But damn, did it feel right.

The elevator chirped as they reached the library, and the bounty hunter glanced at Jesse. The clone still hadn’t answered, but the nervous twitch of his eyebrow spoke of an internal breakdown if Jango had ever seen one.

A tinge of doubt came to his heart. Jesse was young, he remembered, despite his apparent strength. Maybe dropping that burden on his shoulders hadn’t been the right call at all. He still needed to keep a low profile until he had secured Boba and gone to the bottom of the Grand Dooku Masterplan, and an old motto came echoing inside his head.

_Don’t trust anyone. Don’t rely on anyone.  Not unless you have to._

Well, I have to, he internally argued _. I want to._ But the silence stretching between Jesse and him was getting more painful by the second.

“Alright”, Jesse said as they reached the library. “I’m gonna… I’m gonna sit here. At that table. There. And you’re gonna explain to me what the fuck you mean.”

There was a low anger in his voice that surprised Jango.

“How about I go ask Carrots what I need to ask of him, and…”

“No”, the clone said. “No.”

He looked up, and stared at him with a hardness he had never seen on the clone’s face.

“You sit down”, Jesse hissed. “Now.”

With a last look behind him, the bounty hunter begrudgingly complied.

“Alright. What do you want me to say?”

“How about you start from the start? Where the hell did all that come from? Who the fuck is that Carrots guy?”

The clone’s voice was going louder, and Jango winced.

“Can you keep quiet, please? You’re gonna attract attention.”

Jesse laughed, a humorless and cold laugh.

“Me? I’m gonna attract attention? I’m not the one suggesting a brother almost got murdered for some reason by the Kaminoans. For fuck’s sake, Dawn, you sound… You sound like a deserter. Can you hear yourself?”

The words felt like a punch in Jango’s throat. He looked at the clone blankly. He had known that Jesse was a good soldier, of course he had – the man was brilliant and enthusiastic and friendly, but he also never had struck him as a brainwashed protocol fan…

Perhaps, a nasty voice said inside his head, perhaps there was a difference between questioning battle protocol and suggesting treason.

After what felt like an eternity, Jesse wriggled on his seat, and said:

“Look. I’m not… I don’t know what you have in mind. But it’s insane, man, you’ve gotta see that…”

“Forget it”, Jango plainly said. “All of that. Get back to practice, Jesse.”

“Dawn, listen…”

“It was a joke. Carrots is my secret lover, and we were both trying to make fun of you.”

“You think I’m gonna believe that?”

“Yes. I think you’re gonna head out and believe just that, and forget all of this ever happened. Sounds good to you?”

There was an edge to Jango’s voice that he had not meant to carry, but the threat came underlying all the same. The clone looked at him with an aghast look, but the bounty hunter got to his feet before he could add anything else.

“See you later.”

He turned heels before Jesse could see his face, and made his way between the shelves.

_Shit._

His steps turned to strides, as he paced the library in search of the scarred clone who held the truth he needed. The memory of Jesse’s look kept coming back to him, the dismay on his face haunting him with a lukewarm shame.

_Well, that will teach me to open up. Cad would laugh his ass off._

His brain promptly welcomed the thought of his old colleague as a distraction, but he found himself wondering about things that had never crossed his mind before.

As far as Cad knew, and Sugi, and Bossk, and Hondo and Gunray and Raaya and all of his contacts and friends and enemies, he was dead. He had been killed by the Jedi in a mindless battle.

 _Did any of you grieve for me?_ he wondered.

Losing colleagues was part of the job, and he had raised enough glasses to be familiar with the idea that at some point, any of the people smiling and shouting around him could go out never to return.

Every mission with an adversary, every night with a friend could be the last.

He couldn’t remember the last night he had spent with Bane. It had been the Corellian Bank job, right…? Or was it before that time where they had just run into one another on Inagu?

Did Cad remember? Had he emptied a bottle thinking of the twenty years they had shared, two decades of rivalry and friendship and perhaps, perhaps something more?

Had Sugi cried for her youth crush, hated him for never falling for her despite her hilarious efforts? Did she end up in Cad’s lap again despite her promises, trying to quench the emptiness he had left behind?

Or had he been yet another toast, a minute of surprise for all the profession that the number 1 could have fallen, followed by a couple off-handed remarks and a change of topic to the weather?

What was worse, he wondered – being unduly missed, or not being at all?

He suddenly came to a halt, and pressed his aching forehead to the nearest shelf with a groan. A knot was forming in his chest, heavier than it had been for weeks. He needed out, he needed to escape as he usually did, and to hell with those who had expected better of him…

“You okay, man?” a voice asked behind him.

Jango turned, and felt his mind empty from every other thought.

Sitting at a corner desk with his legs crossed, Carrots was looking at him.

_Finally._

\--

Rali was meditating, a painful frown on her juvenile face.

It was always difficult for her to focus on her inner Force, as Aayla called it, when the world was so full of fascinating minds dancing around like fireworks, feelings and thoughts flowing around her endlessly.

Still, she tried. Her master said that she had to listen to herself first if she wanted to listen to others correctly, and her master was always right.

So she focused on the little candle she held firmly, breathing in and out, and observing the flame flicker with as much concentration as she could muster.

A blessed quiet soon came over her mind, replacing the hurricane of outer stimulation with the simple movement of the light. It felt nice, she admitted, to close herself a little – not fully, not like a door locked up, just enough to hush the noise and listen to what was inside…

Thoughts kept popping up in her mind, that she kept trying to suppress. The flame, she said to herself. Look at the flame, feel your breath…

“Everything alright, love?” her master’s voice asked softly. “You look troubled.”

“It’s very hard”, she whispered back.

“Is it? You’re doing fine. I can see your focus.”

“But I keep having thoughts. Instead of the flame.”

“Let them in”, Aayla said while stroking her forehead as lightly as a breeze. “You’re in the right place. If something in you wants to be heard, you can listen now.”

Rali sighed deeply, and let the bubbles of thought come up. She could feel again the anguish of the clone who had fallen, and the smell of rain, and she could see the wink of the man who had helped her out with the tooka ears thing – a burst of shame almost came over, but the candle burnt it away, she had to focus – she was seeing a group of cadets now, shining bright with light, each of them different, more different than the Kaminoans had said they were, except one of them shone even differently, and looked not like the others at all.

She could feel it now – a trail composed of dozens of bits and pieces of memory which made no sense when she looked at them individually, but painted a picture together. Her breath was deeper now, as random feelings and observations came together slowly, like a download in progress, showing more and more and more, Taun We’s little regret when she had talked about the cadets, master Yoda’s trouble when he had seen them off, and the pain in that one clone as he dangled above the sea…

She saw darkness, deep and wide and cold. She saw it slither under the plates of the world, crawling like a snake of ice. She stared at it, aghast.

And then darkness looked back.

As the candle blew out, she screamed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's a pile of stones for you to throw at me - also don't worry, part 2 is already written and coming tomorrow, I just wanted to enjoy my lil cliffhanger and make it reasonable-sized.  
> Not a fan of stone-throwing? Feel free to tell me what your favorite sentence was! The funniest one? The one that broke your heart? (Yeah I've decided to provide a lil comment-helping).


	9. The Edge of Choice (part 2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You guessed it, I HAD to change things into part 2 that I suddenly got unhappy with, oops.  
> Here goes the Sequel of Bounty Hunter Dad’s Terrible No-Good Day !  
> (With a surprise at the end!)

"I've been looking for you", Jango said.  
  
Carrots looked at him silently. No emotion showed on his face, and for a second he wondered if he had the right guy after all - the clone he remembered had been on edge, with a jumpy look to him even when sitting on the floor. He had been as easy to read as an open book, stress painting his features with small wrinkles, anxiety and hostility mixing in his posture like that of a stray dog.  
  
The man in front of him had the best poker face he had ever laid eyes on. Hadn't it been for the crisscrossed scar on his cheek, he wouldn't have recognized him.  
  
"How so?" the man asked, and Jango relaxed a little.  
  
There was a tinge of fear in that question, the tiniest tremor, but it was enough. Most people were slightly less good at bluffing with speech than they were with looks, and Carrots was no exception. It was him alright.  
  
"You're Carrots."  
  
"Don't call me that", the clone snapped back in a low voice. His mask of calm broke down for a second, but he retrieved his composure just as quick.  
  
Jango blinked.  
  
"I... thought it was your name", he apologized.  
  
"It's what people call me", the clone shrugged.  
  
He looked back down at his datapad, and Jango mentally backpedaled. He was too used to people not to understand the nuance in the clone's answer, and he had not meant to antagonize him.  
  
"What should I call you then?" he asked amiably.  
  
Carrots stared at him for a second, and shrugged again.  
  
"Just do like everyone else."  
  
"...You're sure? I can... Alright."  
  
"What do you want?"  
  
"I'm Dawn", Jango started, but the other cut him with a cold chuckle.  
  
"Yeah, I know who you are."  
  
"You remember me?"  
  
He was genuinely surprised. The clone and him hadn't shared a word on the medical station, and he hadn't expected Carrots to remember the random brother with a hole in his liver.  
  
"You're the Stargazer hero", the clone said with a hint of bitterness. "Captain Rex' best buddy."

“I suppose I am?” he replied prudently. “Is that a bad thing?”

“I didn’t say that”, Carrots defended himself. 

“Alright. Look, I know we weren’t properly introduced…”

“You saved me in the Eastern wing”, the clone cut him again, stress more and more visible on his features. “I was cornered by destroyers and you jumped in right from nowhere.”

“I can’t say I recognized you then with the helmet and all”, Jango said, “but that’s good to hear.”

Carrot’s attitude was getting disturbing, and he tried to muster his patience.

“Oh”, the clone said with sudden wariness. “You didn’t… I get it.”

 _I don’t_ , the bounty hunter almost said, but he kept quiet. Carrots was clearly on the brink of breaking, and he couldn’t risk ruining it all by trying to steer him in the wrong direction. Letting people blow up on their own was always far more efficient, and far more truthful.

“So what do you want?” Carrots asked after the brief silence. His face had gone back to perfect stillness, but his voice was nearly vibrating with anxiety.

“I actually remember you from the Lounge”, Jango slowly said. _Easy now._ “Senator Amidala gave her speech, lost the vote, and you said something that had the other guys mention the Rejection…”

And there it was again. The terror, deep and cold, slashing across the man’s face like a knife.

Jango waited, but Carrots said nothing.

“What do you know about it?” he finally asked.

“Nothing”, the clone replied in a toneless voice. “There is nothing to know.”

“Sorry, what?”

“The Rejection is a myth. Every brother has a share to give. Every one of us must serve, and we will find out how.”

“Oh, kriffing hell. Not you too”, Jango snapped. He could feel the last threads of his calm slipping through his fingers, a cold anger pouring into the cracks of his determination and filling him with an implacable strength.

“I’ve had it with that shit”, he hissed while grasping at the table where Carrots was sitting. “I’ll ask again, and you’re going to answer.”

He glared at the terrified clone, towering over him.

“What do you know”, he repeated in an icy tone, “about the Rejection?”

“Nothing!” the clone yelled, before clasping his hand over his mouth. “Nothing”, he repeated lower. “There is nothing to know about it. I’ve learnt my lesson, alright? Go tell them.”

The bounty hunter felt the words like a knife through his throat. A veil of lukewarm shock poured over him, running along his spine, and he fell sitting on the bench.

“It’s true, then”, he said blankly. “It’s true?”

Carrots was looking at him strangely, his eyes shining with moisture.

“I told you, I…”

“Shut up. Let me think.”

“I’ve got to go”, the clone muttered, gathering his stuff. Jango’s hand grasped his wrist before he even had time to understand what he was doing.

“You’re not going anywhere”, his voice said for him. 

Deep down, the calm and quiet indifference that took over him during jobs was settling in his mind. _I’m taking care of this. And nobody is standing in my way._

“I have questions for you”, he said without letting the clone go. Carrots tried to wriggle free, but his fist felt like iron. 

_Boba is somewhere in there. Risking fuck knows what because I never bothered to think about the outliers. Because I never bothered to ask._

“You’re hurting me”, Carrots said in a low voice.

“I’ll let you go after you answer. You’re going to tell me everything you know about this.”

“Here?” the clone laughed drily, pulling on his arm. “Yeah, that won’t look suspicious.”

Reality poked at the back of Jango’s brain, peeking between the curtains of cold rage that had fallen over him. He was attracting attention, he was in a very public place with a lot of witnesses, and he was physically threatening the man whose intel he needed.

 _How about we calm the fuck down?_ his inner voice provided kindly.

His fingers unclasped the clone’s wrist, leaving a pale mark. Jango eyed it guiltily, but shook the trouble away. Second thoughts would come later.

“Alright then”, he said. “Pick the time and place. But we are having that conversation.”

Carrots looked at him defiantly, rubbing his wrist, but after a while his shoulders sagged.

“Ten tonight”, he whispered. “The terrace next to the relaxing area.”

“I know the place. No cameras?”

The clone snorted.

“Like that matters to you.”

Jango was going to say that it sort of did, actually, very much so, but Carrots grabbed his datapad and dodged away.

_That went well._

Jesse was nowhere to be seen when he headed out, and he felt a bitter taste come to his tongue. It didn’t matter, he tried to internally argue. He was bound to leave at some point, perhaps it was for the best that his relationship with clones got strained enough to fly away without regrets. Perhaps getting some distance from him would save Jesse’s hide when shit would start hitting the fan. 

Perhaps the doubt and pain in his friend’s eyes hadn’t cut him as deep as it felt.

A headache came pounding between his eyebrows again, and he bit his cheeks hard. He’d go back to the medbay, he decided, and tell Kix he hadn’t dared to ask him for pills. He wasn’t usually fond of pain medicine, but right now the numbness was something he would dearly welcome. 

His hands were shaking, he realized. He slowed his steps, forcing himself to breathe in patterns as he made his way back, faking smiles at the clones he passed. Thoughts were storming in his head, increasing the pain as they went round and round. Jesse was going to panic, and to alert Stealth and Tup about his demeanor; one way or another, someone was going to overhear, and word would come to Rex’ ears. Would the captain understand? he wondered. Would he ask to hold their meeting earlier on a false pretense, only to catch him off-guard? 

He stopped as he reached the main hall. On his right, the corridor to the shuttle bay laid inviting. You can still flee, it promised. You can get away before all of this goes to hell. Boba will be safe, Boba will understand, you left him to wait before…

A ship flew from the bay into the stormy sky, and Jango watched it go with his hand on the window pane. 

He could leave.

And then what? Get back to his own life, keep the charade going for as long as he could, and at the end of the line, swim away into the great darkness with as many regrets as there had been lies?

 _Fuck that_ , he thought. 

Turning his back to the shuttles, he steeled himself and walked away. 

_If I die, I die. But I won’t drown alone._

Streams of clones were passing him, and for once the crowd was getting overwhelming. He took a shortcut to the medbay, the memories of his former life melding with the white maze. Second right, stairs to the left, he thought. And then the little service door to the upper walkway, and then…

And then he heard crying. 

The flow of self-doubt and introspection in his brain came to a halt, and he peeked into the nearby passage. A Twi’lek was sitting on the steps, hugging herself in a tight grasp. The tremor in her lekku and the slightly acrid smell of her spoke of intense dismay, and he felt the rest of the world melt away as he approached. 

“Master Secura?” he asked. 

The woman took a sharp intake of breath as she noticed him. Her beautiful dark eyes met his, and she seemed to decide keeping a facade was not worth it, because after a second she lowered her head again. 

“What happened?” Jango questioned as he came kneeling near her, touching her calf over the tattoo she had showed him a few days ago. He was hoping the familiarity of the Twi’lek gesture would comfort her, but she only broke down harder, silent sobs shaking her muscular shoulders. 

“It’s Rali”, she eventually managed, and the bounty hunter felt his heart sink. 

“What about her? Aayla, tell me. What happened?”

“I don’t know”, she said in a broken voice. “We were working and-and she fell - and now they’ve taken her and they won’t let me in and…”

The words came pouring out of her in a shabby flood, and Jango clutched her leg tighter. 

“I’m sorry”, she let out, “it’s not - we’re not meant to…”

“It’s alright”, he said. “Is she alive?”

“I don’t know”, the Jedi repeated in a cry. “I don’t know, I can’t feel her, everything is meddled- Obi-Wan told me to get out because my tr-trouble was too loud - and it’s unworthy, I’m better than this, I should be with her, I need to calm down-I need…”

“You need to let it out for a minute”, Jango cut her. “Your padawan is hurt. Of course you’re troubled. It’s normal.”

“But I’m…”

“Yeah, you’re a Jedi. I’m aware. I’m also not getting in a debate about the irrelevance of some your Order’s principles six thousands years after they were enacted, nor about translation issues, cultural considerations and the flexible nature of morality, so I’ll remain factual.”

The Jedi snorted in between sobs, and Jango continued.

“The girl you consider your surrogate daughter is in trouble. You love her. She loves you. That’s normal - hell, it’s _good_. Don’t tell me shit about how you people are not meant to grow attached - if you’re not attached to the children you’re basically raising, you don’t deserve the influence. Now. Your pain is normal. Your trouble is normal. Start by embracing that. Then, and only then, you’ll decide if you let it take the better of you.”

“No”, she immediately replied, and he shook his head. 

“I said _then_. We’re going to take… let’s say two minutes. I’m gonna sit here, and you’re gonna cry all you want on my shoulder - or not, if you’re not the touchy type. Your call. I’ll tell you when the time’s up. And _then_ , you’ll take a nice, deep breath, get in there, and tell Kenobi to kriff off.”

“He’s my boss”, she said while running a hand on her nose. “And he’s right - I’m no help if I disturb the Force…”

“Fuck that”, Jango said firmly. “Now come here and cry.”

She laughed a little, a low and broken laugh, and she fell to her knees into his arms. Her hands clasped at his shirt, and he could feel her tears wetting his chest. Murmuring soft nothings in her ear, he held her gently, rubbing the points of her lekku where he knew Twi’leks got tension. 

“Where did you learn to do that?” she asked after a while, her sobs turning to calmer sniffling. 

“What?”

“That thing you’re doing with your hands.”

 _Shit_ , he thought aghast. He couldn’t exactly tell her that he had spent two years on Ryloth hunting a gang of slavers and getting closely accustomed to the local anatomy, could he?

“I… uh. Watched tutorials?”

She laughed for real then, a hoarse chuckle shaking her slender frame. 

“Tutorials. For touching Twi’leks.”

“I swear, it’s not what it sounds like”, Jango protested, mortified. 

“Sure, Dawn. How’s the timing?”

“... Ten more seconds.”

“Good. Think you can keep doing that without getting a boner? I was going to praise your kindness, I’d hate to have to reconsider.”

“You’re the one imagining things. I’m merely fond of the knowledge.”

She let out a last, undignified snort into his clavicle, and raised her head. 

“Alright”, she said after a deep breath. “I think I’m ready now.”

Jango nodded, and let her go with a tinge of something that was definitely not regret. She kept looking at him with pensive eyes, still kneeling on the floor.

“Would you mind coming with me?” she asked in hesitation. “It’s not an order. If you don’t want to or you have things to do…”

He silently patted her calf again, then raised to his feet and smiled. 

“Come on”, he said, offering his hand. 

She took it without a second thought, and raised her other hand to touch his chest where the sun laid. 

“Touching someone’s sinya’ra has meaning, you know. Was that in the same tutorial? ” she asked without removing it. 

“Yes. It was a very… considerate tutorial.”

She tried and failed to suppress a grin, and punched him lightly on the arm. 

“I’ve got to say, I didn’t think you were the type to drool over my species.”

“It’s not the species”, Jango replied softly. “I’m more interested in specific individuals.”

“Smooth talker.”

She gave his hand a tight grasp before letting go, and she waved the door open to the medbay. The silence was so abnormal that Jango felt his heart clench, and he followed the Jedi to a close cubicle. 

The little girl was lying boneless on a bed, looking tiny and frail on the mattress, and it took him a second to realize what was disturbing him. 

Child-sized mattress, the observational part of his brain provided. Of course they had those. 

Somehow, the idea was suddenly sickening. 

He kept his eyes on the Devaronian girl, but he saw others in her place. How many children had come to lay there, looking at the white ceiling with the desperate focus you got in a hospital bed? How many had seen their limbs broken, removed, stitched back? How many had feared for their lives in those pristine sheets - and how many had been right?

_One of you. I saved one of you._

Thousands of children were floating at the back of his mind, as they had been in the growth tubes while Taun-We had brought him the one he called his own. 

_One of you. Picked by chance among all his brothers to live another life._

It wasn’t enough.

He watched as Aayla moved around, asking questions to medics and conferring with several Jedi, until a gentle hand pushed on his shoulder to move him away. 

“Sorry”, Obi-Wan Kenobi said. “It’s a bit busy right now. Did you need anything?”

The Jedi looked more tired than the last time he had seen him, wrinkles and dark circles marking his face with a new wariness, but his eyes were still just as bright. With a little surprise, Jango realized he wasn’t afraid anymore. He remembered the first exchanges he had had with clones, the constant worry of saying something wrong and blowing his cover, the discomfort of the mask over his personality. 

The mask didn’t feel so heavy anymore. Maybe the secret to deception was actually not to deceive. 

He wondered what Sugi would have thought about that. Facing the Jedi, he smiled, and it was Dawn’s smile.

“I’m all settled, thanks”, he replied. “Is the kid alright?”

The Jedi shrugged, and put a scanning probe over the girl’s forehead. 

“Little Force-related incident”, he said with a lightness that didn’t fool Jango for a second. “I would appreciate if you kept it to yourself.”

“Sure. What are you doing with those? If it’s a Force thing, can’t you just… you know.”

He made a vague hand-waving gesture, and the Jedi laughed. 

“We can, but it’s limited.”

“Nothing beats a proper beta-scan to check midichlorians”, a nearby medic said - Blade, Jango’s memory provided at his greatest surprise. They had talked once. He used to never remember names that easily before.

Blade mistook his trouble for confusion, and explained. 

“You know, those hormone thingies that all living species share in one shape or another? Midi like in medium, cause they’re basically the common denominator to life? Turns out the Force impacts them.”

“It does?” Jango politely asked. He had never held much interest for biology, but Kenobi was staring at him strangely and playing good clone seemed like a very good idea at the moment. 

“Yep. We’re still not sure how exactly, but they get packed in some areas - eye vessels, padrionary glands if you’re amphibious. And occipital lobe too. Fuck knows why. But if something in the Force messed her up, it will show here.”

“That’s… actually neat”, Jango admitted with a little surprise. “I never thought the Force was so material.”

“It’s a vast subject of study”, Kenobi replied while stroking his beard. 

The bounty hunter felt a hint of anxiety come over him, but he chased it, keeping his mind blank and focused on other things. The tiny silhouette on the bed provided enough distraction for that, he thought darkly. 

“I’m terribly sorry”, the Jedi said with an acute look. “Have we met before?”

Jango considered the man facing him. For a second, he was almost tempted to tell the truth, just to see the look on his handsome face. He shrugged the thought away. Kenobi was sharp, but he was sharper still. And he had no strong feelings towards the man - he didn’t fear him nor resent him, which meant a distinct advantage when faced with someone who was basically a walking emotion parable.

“I doubt it”, he simply said. “Why?”

Deepening the subject and turning the question over, as he had taught Boba, was always the best way to deflect attention. People didn’t mind explaining themselves, but they noticed evasive answers.

“I don’t know”, the Jedi pondered. “You seem familiar.”

Jango couldn’t help laughing, to Kenobi’s surprise. 

“Smooth”, he said. “That’s got to be the most efficient pick-up line around here, too.”

Blade let out a loud cackle before proceeding with his maneuvers, while the Jedi silently opened his mouth, and closed it back. 

“It’s not… It wasn’t what I meant. My apologies. And for the record, none of you look the same.”

“Yeah, we work hard on that”, Jango stated monotonically. “Can I… I don’t know. Help with something?”

“Grab me some headache pills, please?” Aayla asked as she returned with a fresh towel, that she put over Rali’s head. “Obi-Wan, this is Dawn. I don’t believe you’ve met. He’s the flamethrower guy with a crush on me.”

“That’s not true”, Jango protested. 

“What, you don’t use a flamethrower?” Kenobi asked. “I’m starting the reading. Let’s see…”

He adjusted the probe helmet, nodded at Blade who raised a thumb behind his control panel, and put his hand on the girl’s chin.

The scanner hummed to life, and the Jedi closed his eyes with a deep breath.

“Alright”, the medic said. “I’ve got something in D4. Can you impulse?”

Jango had no idea what that all meant or what Kenobi did then, but just as his fingers contracted, the girl’s eyes flickered opened.

“Well, that was quick”, Blade said in an impressed tone. 

“Yeah”, the Jedi slowly replied, staring strangely at the padawan. “I’m not sure…”

“Rali!”

Aayla almost jumped onto the mattress to hug the girl, who blinked in the light with confusion. She patted her master back awkwardly after a while, with seemingly no reaction to the Jedi’s uncontrolled blabbering.

“Water?” she croaked while rubbing her eyes. She was looking a little dazed, and Aayla quickly nodded.

“Of course, love”, she hurriedly said, and scampered away. Obi-Wan had moved away from the bed as well to look at Blade’s scans, which left Jango facing the little girl alone.

He smiled kindly, and she returned it with what looked like doubt.

“Hello”, she said neutrally.

A strange intuition came over the bounty hunter, years of observation and paranoia fueling him with a deep feeling of wrongness. 

Something was off.

“How are you feeling?” he enquired while staring at her straight in the eye.

“Better now”, the girl said.

Her tone was amiable and unfazed, but she held his gaze without a tinge of shyness. Jango felt the intuition take root in his mind. He had learnt long ago not to ignore the small signals sent by his subconscious perception, and so he went along with it.

“You remember me, right?” he asked.

Rali blinked, nonplussed, but she still didn’t avert her gaze.

“I’m a little… tired”, she apologized with a humility that Jango immediately perceived as fake. “The lights are very bright.”

“I’m Trick”, Jango said. “From the training center.”

The girl smiled politely, and the bounty hunter felt his throat clench.

“Of course. Trick. Sorry. I remember you.”

“Of course you do”, he said softly. He looked at the body, the thing in the child-sized bed, and felt anger bubbling in his veins, boiling his blood with a wave of heat.

The child looked at him strangely, and clasped the sheet with an expression he knew too well. He had borne the same for the first weeks. 

“What are you doing here?” she finally asked with an underlying irritation.

Jango smiled then, a wide and awful smile. He glanced around - Kenobi was focused on the screen, a deep frown cutting his face. Looking back at the child, he felt something terrible settle in his heart, and walked forwards, grabbing the bed railing with clenched fists.

“You know, I could ask you the same”, he calmly said. “But I’ll start with an easier one. Who are you?”

The girl looked at him with an offended look, but something flashed through the dark eyes, and it was enough.

“Master”, she whined as Aayla returned. “The clone is bothering me.”

“I think we have a problem”, Jango said as the Jedi approached. 

“What problem?” Aayla frowned, handing the glass to her girl.

“She doesn’t know who I am.”

“Of course I do”, the child snapped. “You’re Trick. We meet a lot of you people, your name slipped my mind, is all…”

The Jedi and Jango shared a look. For once, he found himself wishing she could feel what he was trying to convey.

“Don’t worry, dear”, Aayla said affectionately. “I know.”

She walked briskly around the bed to come to her side, a warm smile on her beautiful face. In a swift and sudden move, she grabbed the girl’s forehead with a forceful clasp.

The scream that came out of the child’s mouth was the worst thing Jango had ever heard.

“Shit”, Blade exclaimed, and Kenobi came running to them. Dark wisps were swirling around the bed, and Rali’s body kicked and thrashed while the horrible cry came running from her throat, but Aayla stood still. 

The look on her face was terrifying.

Jango walked back as Kenobi shoved him aside, grasping the girl’s arms. He could feel something pounding around him, as if he was bathing in a rave party, only more nauseating. 

The scream went higher, higher still, to a final note - and then it broke, and a shockwave punched him in his belly. He fell to his knees, gasping for breath. 

“Shit shit shit”, he could hear Blade whisper as the clone scrambled for his fallen instruments. Aayla’s heavy breathing was cutting the silence in a slow rhythm, threatening to turn into sobs.

“I’m fine”, a little voice suddenly piped in a croaked tone. “It made me scream because it wanted you to stop, but it didn’t hurt - I’m alright master, I promise…”

There were sobs then, and Jango felt a gentle hand raise him to his feet. Kenobi looked at him with kind professionalism growingly hiding the shock on his features, and he smiled stiffly.

“I think you ought to go”, he said. “And I don’t need to remind you, I’m sure, that everything you saw here…”

“Pursed lips”, Jango stated while wobbling a little. “What the fuck was that? Possession?”

“What would you know about that?” the Jedi asked quizzically.

“I… I watch a lot of movies.”

“Well, thank fuck for pop culture”, Obi-Wan Kenobi muttered.

Jango laughed, startled, and the Jedi sighed, stroking his forehead.

“Off you go, then”, he said amiably. “She’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

He shooed him gently towards the door, clacking his tongue when Jango tried to shoot a look at Blade’s scanning screens.

The door hissed closed behind him, and Jango let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

He looked around him, feeling his muscles slightly relax as the shock passed.

_What the hell was that?_

The sight of the screaming kid was burnt under his eyelids, the complete uselessness he had felt pounding in his heart. He would need to ask Aayla. The Jedi would give him answers, he had no doubt about that. He let his feet take him to the training area absent-mindedly; for a second, he had the strange feeling of being followed, but that was unavoidable when everyone was headed the same way, so he shook it off in annoyance.

The rest of his squad was already well into their daily session when Jango passed the door; he nodded at Sergeant Boost, mouthing ‘medbay’ as he passed, and the officer winked at him to join his fellow soldiers. 

He felt his chest clench when his eyes met Jesse’s ; the sniper turned his gaze to his next target with a purposeful indifference.

He gave Stealth an evasive explanation for his tardiness, waved off Tup’s apology for his Morning Hair drama, and grabbed the nearest gun with a heavy heart.

“Kind of you to finally join us”, a voice drawled behind him, dripping with fake amiability. 

He turned to discover Spectre disbanding a shotgun rifle with an obvious enjoyment of his own skills; the clone was twirling the various parts with a concentrated squint. Jango almost rolled his eyes; he was well aware of his own tendencies for showing off, but it was a different thing.

_I’m the best. I’m entitled to parading a bit in the midst of my natural humility._

Spectre, he decided, was a little asshole who was just good enough to be unnerving.

“Missed me already?” he replied in a silken tone. “Don’t worry, I’m here. I can finally show you how to properly use a gun.”

Behind the white-haired clone, Boil and Waxer snorted, while a third silhouette stiffened for a second, shooting an anxious glance his way. Of course Carrots would be terrified of the dickish brother with the hair dye, Jango thought. He tried not to look at the scarred clone, and shot Spectre a condescending smile. 

There was no mirth in his laugh, and his eyes held a promise that made the bounty hunter’s flesh crawl.

“You think you’re that good a shot, then?” Spectre asked. The intensity of his glare felt suddenly familiar, and Jango hid a satisfied smile. Cad used to look at him that way when they had started bumping into each other in jobs, and he invariably ended up winning the prize right under the (non-existing) nose of the Duros.

He had missed being seen as an adversary. There was a special kind of delight in feeling he rubbed off people the wrong way by being himself.

“Oh, no”, Jango dismissed. “I’m average at everything.”

It was true, too. He had never had Cad’s proficiency with hacking and circuitry, nor Aurra’s talent with sniping. Bossk could rip him in half in hand to hand combat, Sugi was the top infiltrator, Dengar was the best at pissing people off (though Hondo certainly was a strong contender). Yet none of them had ever come close to dethroning him, mostly because he knew how to make them work together (or against each other, which also happened). 

He ignored Stealth’s disbelieving noise, and continued:

“I know what I’m good at. I know what people are good at. That’s what _I’m_ good at. So you see, no matter what gun you chose, I can probably find the person here who’s better than you with it _and_ explain you why in excruciating details.”

“Sounds fun”, Spectre said with gritted teeth. “By all means, go on.”

“You’re holding that shotgun wrong. You’re not strong enough to handle the recoil with that posture. Tup here is much better at that, because he’s a beefcake and he keeps trying new approaches to improve himself. You were right, that’s fun. Should we do another?”

“My specialty isn’t exactly front line”, Spectre calmly said.

“No? And what is it?”

_Say assassination, pal. Please, say it._

The clone hesitated for a second, and confidently said:

“Long range. I’m a sniper.”

“Right”, Jesse muttered from his position. “Sounds about _accurate_.”

Like hell you are, Jango thought. _You almost dropped a vice when you were reassembling that shotgun._ Snipers could trust their hands blindly ; he had seen Jesse absent-mindedly catch a dried raisin between two fingers without even noticing it.

No, Spectre, with his light-footed gait and his smug confidence in his own lethality, was not a sniper.

_You’re one of my own, kid._

Why the Kaminoans would plan to train men to be assassins, though, was beyond him. He had not planned that in the composition of the Grand Army of the Republic, purposefully making it as squeaky clean and straightforward as he could. A hidden cell of shadowy clones inspired by their original model had not been in the product description, and he wondered if the Jedi knew.

He wasn’t worried, though. Even if Spectre happened to be the deadliest clone of the GAR, _he_ was Jango Fett. That was enough.

“Really?” he exclaimed. “That’s funny. I don’t think I ever saw you shoot long-range. We spend quite a bit of time up there.”

“Timing issues, probably. You want to go now?” Spectre purred, assembling a sniper rifle without looking - and making every effort to _show_ that he wasn’t looking. It was almost cute, Jango reflected. A pup trying to show off his fangs to impress his elders.

He reminded himself that even pups could bite, sometimes.

“Sure”, he said pleasantly. “How about a friendly contest? Jesse’s disqualified, he’s too good.”

Jesse snorted without humor, and looked up, visibly balancing his discomfort with the vibrant need to confront the white-haired clone.

“That’s unfair”, he said. “I’m in. Let’s move this party upstairs.”

“Upstairs” was merely a narrow platform at the very top of the building, where a cramped elevator dropped them. A powerful gust of wind met them with sprays of salty mist, and Jango shivered.

“Not the best conditions”, Jesse commented. “We’d better make this quick.”

“What, are you afraid of falling?” Spectre asked with his strange smile.

Jango felt Carrots tense at his side, and he wasn’t surprised to see the clone mutter something about letting Sergeant Boost know and firmly remain inside the lift. Meanwhile, Spectre had set up the buoy cannon that would deliver the targets, while Jesse took place near the railing.

“I’m always terrible at this”, Stealth complained. “I’ve never hit anything.”

“I have”, Tup said.

“Yeah, I remember. Poor seagull. Face it, vod, you’re as terrible an aim as I am.”

The lift whooshed back with a concerned-looking Sergeant Boost.

“Hey, kids. Enjoying the view?”

“We’re just having a friendly contest”, Spectre casually replied. “It won’t take long.”

Boost looked at him with a nonplussed look, and deadpan replied:

“Yeah. You know what, I’ll stick around. Wouldn’t want another one of you falling over without their squad thinking of pulling him back up.”

Boil and Waxer shared a shameful look, but Spectre just smiled and nodded. 

“It’s on, then.”

It did indeed not take long for the contestants to be drastically skimmed; Boil and Stealth both failed their first shot, and scampered back to the warmth of the lower levels, while Waxer and Tup both managed to put one out with Jango’s advice, under Boost’s affectionate look. The bounty hunter managed to blast three buoys himself before completely missing. He ignored Spectre’s satisfied smile, and let him take his place for the next round. 

The white-haired clone wasn’t bad, he begrudgingly admitted. It made sense to train him in the field he used as a cover, of course.

He sat on the ledge as Jesse and Spectre continued their contest, buoys shooting away with a fluid whoosh. He winked in response to Boost’s knowing look, and slid closer to the sergeant.

“Whose idea was this?” the officer asked.

“Mine”, Jango admitted with a little guilt. “I thought Jesse could use the competition, for once.”

“I’ve seen him shoot”, Boost said.”There’s no competition. Not even with _that_ guy.”

“Do you know him?”

“Spectre? Who doesn’t. Grade A dickhead, but too good to get in trouble. He was in Wolffe’s platoon for a while, but it didn’t work out.”

“Yeah? The more you know. By the way, I haven’t seen him much around lately. Do you know how his affectation is going?”

Boost looked at him strangely, glanced at the dueling snipers - who were now in the midst of a heated debate regarding the next buoy distance - and lowly said:

“Don’t tell anyone I told you. He’s leaving tonight. We both are. He, uh… He offered me a spot in his squad. Force knows who told him about me. But today’s my last day here.”

Jango whistled between his teeth, a heavy feeling settling on his chest.

“That’s… well-deserved. I’m sure he has his reasons. But hey, you’ll come back”, he said, trying to lighten the mood.

“Maybe”, Boost said with a light smile. “Who knows where the likes of us are headed?”

Despite the sadness in his eyes, there was a quiet satisfaction in his voice that Jango didn’t miss. He squeezed the man’s knee as affectionately as he could.

“We’re gonna miss you”, he said with an honesty that surprised him. “You’ve been an amazing teacher.”

“You hardly need any teaching. Wolffe had you on his shortlist, you know?”

“Really?”

“Yes. It seems there is another path for you to take, but I would have loved fighting besides you, Dawn.”

“That’s ominous as hell”, the bounty hunter tried to laugh.

The sudden worry in his chest visibly showed on his features as well, because Boost gave him a reassuring nod.

“Don’t worry. You’ll understand soon enough. You know… I’m glad I got to tell you. Wolffe is not big on goodbyes, and the whole schlick is supposed to be confidential, but it felt wrong to leave without anyone knowing.”

“Did he tell Stealth, at least?”

Boost shook his head.

“Nobody. He is like that. But I know he cares for the kid. So it’s probably for the best that you’ll be there to keep an eye on him.”

“I’ll try. And you take care of yourself, promise? We’ll meet again and you’ll tell me all about that secret squad.”

“I called it the Wolfpack”, Boost confessed, “and he looked at me like I had three heads.”

“Why? It’s hilarious”, Jango protested. 

“I know, right? Apparently, I need to tone down the dad jokes.”

“Don’t you dare.”

“Glad there’s at least one person who truly appreciates it. Let’s face it, Dawn, we’re the daddest dads of this entire city.”

“That we are”, Jango said with a painful smile. 

A scream of fury interrupted them, and he turned his head to discover a blanching Spectre, glaring furiously at a buoy in the distance.

“I win”, Jesse said off-handedly. 

“You shot yours only by luck”, Spectre spat. “That far away, it’s all it is. Sheer dumb luck.”

“Play nice, kids”, Boost said with an underlying warning in his warm voice.

Jesse stared at the white-haired clone for a while, then smiled a horrible smile, walked to the buoy cannon, and shot three more into the horizon.

“You know what?” he said. “Maybe you’re right.”

He crouched back at his position, wiped his brow on his shoulder, and aimed. 

His finger gently stroked the trigger. One, two, three times. In the distance, the little red dots evaporated. 

“Or… no”, Jesse concluded. “That’s just talent.”

He got back up, and patted Spectre’s butt as he passed by. Utter rage misshaping his features, the clone got back to the cannon and amped it to the max. 

“I get one last try”, he muttered. 

The buoy flew away, far and further, and before Spectre even had time to kneel, it exploded in the air.

“Quit hogging the platform”, a voice drawled behind them.

Swirling his own rifle back on his back, Slick gave them a sarcastic salute. Jango returned it with caution, while Jesse still stared in awe at the remains floating away. 

“My apologies, sergeant Slick”, Spectre said with the friendliest smile he had ever seen on the clone’s face. 

The officer waved them away, keeping his eyes on Jango as they moved back to the elevator. 

“Now _that_ would have been a challenge”, Jesse mused in a low voice. 

“Do you want to go back?” Jango offered, forgetting for a moment their clash of the morning.

Jesse snorted coldly. 

“Kamino will dry up before I confront sergeant Slick, even in a friendly contest.”

“What, are you afraid of him?” Spectre laughed.

“Like you aren’t?” 

“He’s an officer. I’m not afraid of our officers”, the clone sagely replied.

“Well, you should”, Boost pleasantly said. “That’s a wise attitude, Jesse.”

“I’m terrified of you too, sarge”, Jesse joked.

“I love hearing that.”

The others were packing up when they got down, and Boost pulled Jango to the side.

“Well”, the sergeant said. “That was an excellent last session. Don’t tell them, alright?”

“I can keep secrets.”

“Yeah”, Boost slowly said. “Yeah, I think that’s true. Can I ask you one last favor?”

“Of course.”

“Keep an ear out for my name. I’ve known you for quite some time now. Speak for me in the lights of the fallen, will you?”

“I absolutely fucking will not. You’d better come back in one piece.”

“I’m serious.”

_So am I._

Still, Jango nodded with a painful knot inside his chest. 

Jesse shot him a strange look when he walked back to them. He was pleasantly surprised, however, to see that Tup and Boil were in a heated discussion about hair care, while Stealth and Carrots were looking at a holovid about explosions together. It felt right to see the lot of them get along.

_If we ignore the whole Jesse-Doesn’t-Talk-To-Me-Anymore situation. And Carrots being lowkey terrified of me._

_Oh, and Spectre being… present._

He swallowed back a deep sigh, and nodded goodbye to Boost as they walked out. The clone officer smiled back with a content peace, and Jango felt tears come to his eyes.

What hell had he put all these boys into, he reflected, for them to be so eager to run towards death.

He didn’t talk much during lunch, and was guiltily glad to see Jesse pretext his need to go get his shots and leave the group for the afternoon.

“What’s up with him?” Stealth asked with a tinge of worry. “He usually needs to be threatened into those.”

“I don’t know”, Jango lied. “He does look a little off. I’ll talk to him later.”

Stealth nodded vigorously.

“Good plan. You’re the best at talking to people.”

The bounty hunter bit back a bitter laugh.

“That I am.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YES I AM EVIL.  
> Yes there will be a part 3, because I completely rewrote the middle of this chapter to fit Something Upcoming I had forgotten about... and yes, this time, the Talk with Carrots is the first thing to happen. But hey, it's 7k already, and I need the high of Posting Something.  
> Sorry for taking my sweet time to get there, I swear it will all make sense. #foreshadowing #herearemorerocks


End file.
